Advanced and systematic searching using biomedical databases

This session is part of the Doctoral School Skills Development programme and is open to postgraduate research students at UCL only. To book a place please login via the programme website.

If you are interested in this session but cannot make the date or are not a postgraduate research student, please contact library.skills@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a session.

This session aims to give an insight into carrying out effective comprehensive and systematic searches using biomedical sciences journal indexing databases.

This session takes literature searching beyond the basics, explaining how to build up a comprehensive search strategy using subject headings and textwords, and covers the importance of saving, recording and revisiting search strategies during your research project. It will also cover notation for writing up a search strategy. To illustrate advanced literature searching techniques this session will look at using databases available to UCL staff and students via the OvidSP interface, focussing on the Medline database. We will also look at this database through the freely available PubMed interface.

The session is particularly suited to people who already have some experience of literature searching but wish to gain the skills to carry this out more rigorously.

By the end of the session you will:

• Be able to carry out complex database searches using thesauri and textword searching and other features
• Be able to use key databases such as Medline to carry out comprehensive and systematic searching
• Save, update, amend and record search strategies.