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Clinical Research: Searching for Literature on a Topic

Keeping Track of Articles and Searches

It’s important to keep track of the relevant articles that you’ve found as well as your search statements. Doing so will be a time saver. They can be a helpful starting point for a librarian assisting you to find more information related to your topic and can be helpful if you need to update your research at a later time. It will also be important to give credit to the author/creator of ideas, data, or information that you use in your research and provide the necessary details to direct readers to the original sources.

Most databases allow you to register for a free account. Depending on the database, this feature can allow you to set up alerts for searches, save searches, save citations to articles, and share sets of articles. In PubMed, you can set up a My NCBI account. With a My NCBI account, you can save searches, set up automatic email updates for searches, create collections, and create a bibliography. See My NCBI Help for more information.

A simple way of keeping track of your research on a topic is to document what you’ve done in Word:

  1. Open a document in Word and type your topic or PICO question at the top of the page.
  2. Record the date for your initial research.
  3. Type in the name of the database you plan on searching.
  4. Once you’ve ran a search, copy and paste the search statement into the document.
  5. Record the following information with each search statement that you run:
    1. number of results,
    2. filters/limiters applied (e.g., date range for publications, language), and
    3. notes pertaining to the search (e.g., additional terms found in the abstracts, PMID numbers for articles of interest).
  6. Repeat steps 1-5 for the next database that you search.

Image of search documentation in Word.

 

Resources for Citing Sources (Medical, Health Sciences, Psychology)
Citation Management Software

Citation management software such as EndNote can help you to store, share, and manage the citations to articles you’ve found. EndNote can even help you cite your articles and create bibliographies. You can find links to both the desktop and online versions on our Quick Links page under Research Tools.