While Google is a great tool for finding restaurants and for planning your vacation, you might think twice before you treat patients with information from Google. Here's a tip sheet that shows the pros and cons.
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s web interface for searching the MEDLINE database as well as other related citations. MEDLINE contains citations and abstracts to the world’s literature in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, public health, allied health, health administration, and the pre-clinical sciences.
Getting to PubMed
Use the videos below to help begin your search in PubMed, or check out our PubMed tutorial guide. As always, contact your librarian to schedule an appointment for a one-on-one PubMed searching consultation.
CINAHL is a primary database for nursing and allied health students and professionals.
Getting to CINAHL
Searching CINAHL
When searching databases, take time to design your search strategy thoroughly.
Focus on one concept at a time; list your main idea for concept #1 along with synonyms, abbreviations, and alternate spellings. Everything in Concept 1 should use the OR boolean. Do the same thing for your other concepts.
Use the AND boolean to combine your concepts together.
Using a Venn Diagram can be useful in your search strategy design:
Additional searching tips:
* (asterisk) - Most databases recognize this as a truncation tool. Use it to truncate your word and search a variation of the words. For example: smok* will search for smoke, smokes, smoking, smokers, smokeless, etc.
" " (quotations) - Most databases will search your words as a phrase when they are placed in quotation marks. For example, a database will search for the words alcohol and addiction together when they are placed in quotations, like this "alcohol addiction". If you search for alcohol addiction without the quotation marks, the database will search for the words alcohol and addiction, but they won't be next to each other. In other words, the paper you find may be about alcohol in one paragraph and addiction [of any kind] in another paragraph.
Here's a video from B.D. Owens Library (Northwest Missouri State University) to help explain boolean operators, asterisks, and quotation marks: