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An educational column by When you need to search the literature for articles that are evidence-based, accurate, and reliable, whether it’s for quality improvement initiatives, human subject research, or school assignments, the best place to look are medical and nursing databases, e.g., PubMed, MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). While “Dr. Google” and Wikipedia may be familiar and handy, try to resist. Remember Google is a search engine that will search for the term you enter wherever it is found on the internet. For example, a Google search of vascular access devices will retrieve millions of results! In literature searching, less is often more. Wikipedia, for all its merits, should never be used for evidence-based scholarly work and should never be cited as a source because information in Wikipedia may be incorrect. Databases, on the other hand, are comprised of articles carefully selected by experts, including physicians and nurses, in the subjects covered by the database.The very first thing you should do is talk to a librarian; this cannot be emphasized enough. Check to see if your hospital or health care center has a library and librarian, and be sure to find out what resources are available. If you are in an undergraduate or graduate program, your college or university must have a library with resources to support your program, even if your course work is 100% online.Library resources and contact with librarians can be done completely remotely. Librarians can often be reached immediately via the library’s website and certainly by phone, email, text, tweet, and possibly via Facebook and other social media platforms. Make an appointment with a librarian to gain insightful guidance for your search. Take the time to get connected to your library. As popular graphic novelist Neil Gaiman once said, “Google can bring you back, you know, 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”1Should you enlist the help of a librarian—and you should—make sure to acknowledge the librarian’s help in your manuscript, or even better, offer them the opportunity to be a coauthor if they want to write the background and/or literature review and participate in other aspects of authorship.There are several databases in the health sciences. For illustrative purposes for this article, we’ll work with PubMed, (www.pubmed.gov), from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Access is free. Please note that there is a full text version that is fee-based. Also, note PubMed indexes more than 5200 allied health journals, including more than 500 nursing journals.To be indexed by a database means to have a journal listed in the database, meaning articles published in the journal can be found easier.CINAHL is another excellent source for literature, but it is available only by subscription. While each database is different, search principles, in general, are similar. Also, for the purposes of this article, only the most often used features will be discussed.If you are able to access a college or university library and thus some database, the library’s home page may have a search box and will offer options to: Search all the library’s resources, including all their databases, books, and so on, at the same timeSearch all their databasesSearch an individual databaseDatabases of all types have become increasingly user-friendly over the years. However, before any searching is begun, you need to stop and think about exactly what information you are looking for; in other words, put your research question into sharp focus. One strategy often used by researchers is the PICO model: Patient/Population/Problem—Intervention—Comparison—Outcome.Of course, it’s not necessary to use the PICO model, but the researcher must take the time to focus on what information is being sought.2 You can start by focusing on key words. A key word search of “vascular access devices” (with quotes) retrieves close to 10,000 results. Still too many, but better than millions. How to narrow that down? PubMed and other databases offer filters enabling you to limit your search by language, by age and/or sex of the patient, or by type of article (Figure 1).While key word searching can suffice, it’s a good idea to do a search using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles (Figure 2).Standard subheadings are assigned to each subject. This is another way, really the best way, to narrow the search so you retrieve only those articles that are exactly what you need. Note all databases have a controlled vocabulary thesaurus like MeSH. If this crash course is confusing, never fear; when you are on the home page of PubMed, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you’ll see 4 separate sections: Learn, Find, Download, and Explore. If you click on Learn a drop-down menu offers several selections including About PubMed, and the all-important FAQs and User Guide. Note another link to the PubMed User Guide can be found directly underneath the search box after you are in your initial search results page. All databases will have similar User Guides. If you have any questions, please contact your librarian; it is also likely the library you are working with will offer live and/or YouTube tutorials in searching the databases they provide. Ten PubMed tutorials taking no more than 23 minutes for all of them can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/hzs7ytka. PubMed, like most if not all databases, provides users with an abstract, or summary, for most of its citations. While the title of an article gives an accurate idea of what the article is about, the abstract is a time-saver as you will then know whether the article is worth reading in its entirety.As you look through your list of articles, you can check off the ones of interest by putting a check mark in the box next to the title and then save them in a number of ways, including to a clipboard, or on a list you can save for up to 8 hours. Later you can view and print out the list, save it to external citation/reference management software (more on that later), or to your My NCBI account (more on that later, too). When you have your list of articles, you can choose how to display them using the Display Options tabs. Format gives you the option to display as a Summary, (PubMed default), Abstract, or by PubMed, a detailed citation, or PMID, the PubMed ID numbers given to every article and another way to locate an article. If you click on Sorted By, you can choose the order in which your search results are listed, e.g., Most Recent, or Best Match. Best Match is one way to find similar articles, although they will be listed in the order of their subject similarity to the original article, not in any specific date order.Many are shocked to find articles of interest are locked behind a paywall, e.g., a website such as a publisher requiring you to pay for access to the article. Remember publishing is a business and like any other business it wants to sell its product. In recent years librarians and academics have pushed to make articles open access, or immediately available; in response some major publishers are offering some of their articles in this way. When you find an article of interest, you may be fortunate enough to be connected with a health sciences library having a number of electronic journals so you may be able to immediately link to your article. If not, look carefully at the citation to see if it is immediately available in another way; look in the upper right-hand corner for the words Open Access, Free, or the image of an opened padlock. Also be sure to see if there is a Free in PMC icon; this means the full text is available in PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH free digital archive of articles. If the article is not available free and does require payment, this is yet another time to turn to your librarian. If the library does not have access to the article, it can be obtained for you by interlibrary loan.Many digital immigrants who did research before the Internet remember—without any fondness—the labor-intensive task of keeping track of all the articles found and creating their Works Cited, or References page.3,4 Thankfully, today’s researcher can use external citation management software to do this and when using PubMed, can create a My NCBI account for article collections.My NCBI allows you to save searches and set up automatic searches that are sent to you by email. To create a My NCBI account (NCBI being the National Center for Biotechnology Information) go to https://account.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/signup, select a 3rd party login and follow the instructions. Those who have used PubMed in the recent past might remember a My NCBI option on the home page of PubMed. That has been discontinued; however, if the user has an existing account, it can still be accessed via the URL above. Once you have performed a PubMed literature search and selected articles of interest, click on the Send To button. There are 4 choices: Clipboard, My Bibliography, Collections, and Citation Manager. As previously mentioned, Clipboard is a way to create a list of those articles you’ve selected and then print it in the format of your choice; remember your search list is only saved on PubMed for 8 hours. Using Collections is the way you’ll save your search permanently to your My NCBI account. Note the My Bibliography is not what you probably think it is. No, it’s not a way to format a Works Cited or Reference List; that’s where Citation Manager comes into play. My Bibliography is a way for authors to list and share their own body of work.Citation managers or reference managers allow you to organize your literature, and more importantly they allow you to cite while you write. In other words, while you are writing your manuscript you have the reference manager open and insert the references (in whatever format the author guidelines require). Then the reference manager will format your bibliography for you. If you need to change to a different format (e.g., from American Medical Association style to American Psychological Association style) it is not a problem; simply change the format in the reference manager.There are many citation and reference managers. First and foremost, check to see if your library offers one free of charge to you. If not, we recommend choosing one that is inexpensive, works on several operating systems, backs up to the cloud, and works with your word processing software. The Table reviews some important characteristics of 4 reference management software programs. All these software products support accessing your references online.More information can be found at each product’s website. Review the features of each and choose the software that is right for you. Using reference management software will save you time in terms of organizing your references, citing your literature, and revising your manuscripts—especially if you must change formatting styles.This article gave you a crash course in the best way to find evidence-based, accurate, and reliable articles, namely by using databases of medical and nursing literature, resisting the urge to turn to Google and Wikipedia. Above all, be sure to consult with your librarian to assist you with your research needs and help you access the information you need for your quality improvement project or human subjects research investigation. Questions and comments are encouraged regarding this article. Should you have questions or comments please contact AVA Foundation Director at Large Dr. Gregory E. Gilbert at SigmaStatsConsulting@gmail.com. Please put the title of the article in the Subject line.GEG conceived of the topic. CBJ wrote the first draft. GEG wrote the section on Citation Managers and Reference Managers. CBJ wrote the remaining sections. Both authors made critical revisions and contributed substantial content to this article. CBJ serves as corresponding author. Both authors approved the final manuscript.The authors are indebted to Michelle L. Hawes, DNP, RN, CRNI, VA-BC, ACRP-CP for her insightful suggestions regarding the manuscript.
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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.