This blog is kindly written for BMERG by one of our amazing subject librarians, Richard Kielb. Richard takes us through some top tips around searching databases whilst undertaking your research, and some tips for breaking down the process.

When it comes to research, different search strategies are needed dependent on the nature and context of your work. Sometimes you may just need a book or a few relevant articles on a subject, and in this situation a quick search of your local library catalogue can often be sufficient. For more detailed research, it is likely to be more important to be able to carry out a comprehensive review of the literature, and this will usually require an advanced search using bibliographic databases.

So what is a bibliographic database? A database will allow you to search across very large numbers of academic sources simultaneously. Most of these sources will be academic journals, but some databases will include book chapters, conference proceedings, systematic reviews etc.

Different subjects will be supported by particular databases, so it will be important to identify the ones that are most relevant for you. Medical education would be a good example of a topic which would cross over more than one subject, so you would need to consider searching in databases recommended for both Medicine and Education as well as others with a multi-disciplinary focus.

Which databases you choose to use will depend very much on the topic you are researching and also what resources you have access to as an individual or a member of an institution. Many databases are not free to access and can be extremely expensive, but they are often provided by library services in organisations such as Universities and in the NHS.

Although the various databases have search interfaces that look quite different, the basic principles listed below will generally apply to all of them. Some of the functionality and ‘wildcard’ symbols etc might be slightly different, but there are usually help pages and guides available that will help indicate how it all works.

There are four basic stages to the database searching process:

• Break your question down to its main concepts
• Decide on the relevant search terms
• Combine your search terms
• Review your results

Breaking your question down to its main concepts

For clinical questions you may have come across the PICO formula to identify your concepts, and you can consider doing something similar for your medical-education topic. The social science framework called SPICE can be useful:

S – Setting Where does the research happen?
P – Population Who is your research focused on? Is your population defined by age, gender, ethnicity etc?
I – Intervention What are you investigating? Is it the use of technology or participation in a particular educational programme?
C – Comparator Are you comparing anything with your main intervention?
E – Evaluation Appraising the value, validity, or effectiveness of the intervention.

As with PICO you do not necessarily need to have a concept for every SPICE element.

Decide on the relevant search terms

Next you will need to consider what terms to search in relation to all of the different concepts. Include likely variations in terms in order to carry out a comprehensive review and to avoid missing any papers which are relevant to your topic. It will be important to factor in all synonyms, related terminology and any variations in spelling (particularly UK/US).

Keyword searching, also known as free-text searching, is where you will look for exact matches for your search terms in the titles and abstracts of journal articles. It is also useful to include searches in any controlled vocabulary offered by your chosen database, for example resources like Medline, ERIC and Cinahl offer ‘Subject Headings’, which make it easier to locate papers on a specific subject. Each article listed in the database is assigned a number of Subject Headings which represent what topics it covers. The advantage of this is that all of the articles on the same subject will be given the same subject heading, independent of the terminology used by the individual authors.

Combine your search terms

The Boolean search operators (OR, AND, NOT) can be used to combine your searches effectively.

• Use OR to combine searches about the same concept – synonyms, related terms, variant spellings (e.g. Vitamin C OR ascorbic acid). This will broaden your search.
• Use AND to combine searches about different concepts (e.g. caffeine AND asthma). This will narrow your search.
• Use NOT to exclude terms from your search. This can be useful if you are retrieving some irrelevant content but use an element of caution as this can also remove useful material that may have mentioned the excluded term.

Review your results

Critically appraise your results (are they relevant to your research topic?) and decide if you need to make any changes to your search strategy. When you have run your search, you will often find that you either have more or fewer results than you were expecting.

• Too many? Look for ways to make your search more specific. Can you add concepts? Are there valid ways to limit your results (publication date range, age group, language etc)?
• Too few? Look for ways to make your search more general. Are there any terms that could be removed? Would broader search terms be useful?

Setting ‘limits’ can also be helpful as many of the databases will provide a series of in-built limits and filters, so it can be useful to investigate the options available.

Remember that your local Librarian will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have about using bibliographic databases and finding information more generally! At the University of Bristol you can find your subject specific librarian at: www.bris.ac.uk/library/subject-support/