Undergraduate and Postgraduate Medical Education

Step 1: Determine if you need an evidence-based point of care overview (Dynamed), a couple of good papers/conducting a regular literature review (Pubmed Clinical Queries), or if you are doing a large scale project like a systematic or scoping review (Medline etc). 

Step 2: Re-phrase your research topic into an answerable question. This ensures your search is targeted and helps with screening abstracts and selecting papers.

Step 3: Identify your key concepts and do a quick search in Google Scholar to see what your peers and colleagues are doing.

Q: Are there are seed papers, seminal works or ideal articles that can help inform your next steps?

Q: Are you discovering new phrasing or highly cited authors?

Step 4: Think about synonyms/like/related terms/phrases/acronyms, and combine them in a column or list with OR in-between. This is the start of your logic string; you are essentially telling the database you are interested in Concept A OR related term OR related term etc etc. 

Do this for each of your terms and use the AND operator in between the distinct element of your question.

The goal with any research project where you are doing some literature searching is to be able to identity the distinct elements of your research question. If it helps, consider using the PICO model:

P - population/problem/patient

I - intervention/exposure

C - comparison

O - outcome

SYNONYMS: neoplasm OR cancer

RELATED TERMS: "myocardial infarction" OR "heart attack"

ALTERNATE SPELLING: analyze OR analyze

GEOGRAPHICAL SPELLING: pediatric OR  paediatric

SUFFIX VARIANCES: educat* = educate, education, educator etc.

ACRONYMS: ADHD / SIDS / HIV / SSRI / IgAN / MAID

BRAND NAMES/GENERIC: "virtual reality headset" OR "oculus rift" / "social media" OR Twitter / acetaminophen OR Tylenol