Research Questions
This is the model, often used in clinical medicine, to help formulate a specific, answerable question.
What is PICO?
This combining word is used when you are searching for synonyms or alternative words/phrases in a database.
What is OR?
This is the National Library of Medicine's system of subject headings (or controlled vocabulary).
What is MeSH?
This is the primary characteristic of grey literature.
What is "not controlled by commercial publishers"?
This is the PICO element that is often missing in the question.
What is "C", the comparison?
When searching two or more words that you need to keep together, what punctuation mark would you enclose the words with?
What are quotation marks?
This MeSH subheading is useful for searching for articles on the pharmaceutical treatment of various conditions.
What is drug therapy?
What is the most common tool used to search grey literature?
What is Google?
In the following clinical question, identify the O or outcome. For patients with dental implants, is smoking a factor in the success of the dental implant?
What is "the success of the dental implant"?
When you'd like to search all variations of a word, such as Canada and Canadian, what punctuation mark would you append to the root of the word?
What is an asterisk or star symbol?
Applying this to your search term will limit retrieval to only those articles in which the subject heading is a major concept.
What is focus?
Name two signs that a journal might be predatory?
What are: typos, grammatical mistakes, no location for office, wide scope
What are the two main types of databases?
What are keyword and subject heading databases?
When you use this Boolean operator, you are asking for each and every element to be present in your results.
What is AND?
In Medline, this function allows you to search a broad subject heading and ALL the more specific subject headings indented underneath it.
What is Explode?
This list provides a list of legitimate open access journals.
What is the Directory of Open Access Journals? (DOAJ)
You could use this to answer a "background" question.
What are: textbooks, reliable websites, review articles
What is the name of the technique used to find words in a document a specified number of words away from each other?
What is Adjacency or Proximity?
Age group, publication type, year of publication, male and human are examples of this.
What are limits?
What is the main thing to be aware of when using Google to search for information?
What is Google Personalized Searching?