Search Strategy and Information
Retrieval
By
Rekha Gupta, NIC
g.rekha@nic.in
SEARCH STRATEGY
The Search strategy is a plan that helps
you look for the information you need.
Search Strategy Tips
• Identify the key concepts (Keywords). e.g. What role does
pain have in sleep disorders? The key concepts are: pain,
sleep disorders
• e.g. Microbubbles breast cancer treatment?
The Key concepets are: microbubbles, breast cancer,
treatment.
• Detremine alternative terms for these concepts, if needed.
e.g. cancer – neoplasms
• Refine your search to dates, age groups, language, etc., as
appropriate
• Practice helps
Scope of Search
• In search strategy development, it is important
to remember that the computer searches for
words not concepts.
• Words can be searched in a natural language
fashion
• The search of a word can be limited to a
specific field.
• Without requesting a particular field, the
search will be conducted for the word
automatically, or by default, in all the fields.
Main Resources for Medical search
– International
• PubMed
– National
• IndMED
Resources like PubMed and IndMED helps you to gather
references to earlier research / work done in a
systematic manner.
PubMed
• PubMed is the free public interface to MEDLINE.
• It provides access to bibliographic information in
MEDLINE as well as additional life science journals.
• MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier
bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine,
nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care
system, and the preclinical sciences.
• MEDLINE contains citations from the 1950's to
present, covering more than 4,500 biomedical journals.
There are currently over 14 million records in the
database.
IndMED
• IndMED = INDexing of Indian MEDical Journals;
http://indmed.nic.in
• Why?
– Poor representation of Indian medical Journals in PubMed.
(MEDLINE)
– To expose the Indian medical research literature globally
• Started to Index Non-PubMed but quality Indian
journals, now Indexes even PubMed journals hosted
on MedIND (Full Text)
• Indexes only peer reviewed journals
• Provide a world wide free access over the Web
• Coverage of journals back from 1985 onwards
• Provides references along with Abstracts
• Full text links are provided at articles level for
those journals who have signed MOU with NIC
for hosting on MedIND
Journal Selection Criteria
•
•
•
•
Journal should be Peer-reviewed
Journal should be published on time
Journal should be published at least twice in a year
Journal should have started at least three years prior
to selection
• Journal should follow the guidelines of International
Committee of Medical Journal Editors (IJMJE http://www.icmje.org/)
Searching
HOW TO SEARCH
• To search by an author's name, enter the author’s last
name plus initials without punctuation e.g.smith ja,
jones k.
• If you know only the author’s last name, use the
author search field tag[au], e.g. smith[au]
• To search by topic type as it is, in the search box
without any boolean operators and punctuations e.g.
Microbubbles breast cancer treatment.
Continued :
• To search by journal title either you enter journal
titles in full e.g., molecular biology of the cell; or the
MEDLINE abbreviation, e.g., mol biol cell;
• To search for an journal go to Single Citation Matcher
on the home page of pubmed.
PubMed helps you choose search terms. When you enter a word, an automatic list will be
generated listing possibilities.
Searching
With 19 million (and growing) citations in the database, a basic search will generate more
hits than you may want. Use Limits to focus your results. One of the limits is to free full text.
Once you activate limits, they will continue to be applied to your search results until you
change or remove them.
PMC or FREE?: PMC (PubMed Central) is a database within a database. PMC is a
collection of medical journals that make their articles available for free in compliance
with NIH grants’ regulations. While you can search PubMed Central separately, all PMC
results also display in PubMed.
In addition, many medical publishers—whether contributing to PMC or not—make
articles available for free. PubMed also links to these articles, making PubMed a useful
tool for finding free fulltext articles.
The Abstract view includes much helpful material: related citations (notice how the
Review articles are indicated), a link to all related reviews, links to information in other
NCBI databases, and your recent activity in PubMed.
Thank You