HOW TO SEARCH DATABASES VIA ATHENS

Transcription

1 HOW TO SEARCH DATABASES VIA ATHENS Where do I go to search the databases? You can access these databases at although you will need an Athens user-name and password to use the Advanced Search feature described in this leaflet. To find out how to get an Athens user-name and password call the library on x3172. What are the benefits of searching databases? Databases concentrate on peer-reviewed, high-quality journals so you can be sure that the information you find is of a high quality. Different databases specialize in different topics so you can concentrate on a particular subject area without getting lots of irrelevant results. You can use a range of different search techniques to get a clear, focused set of results You can save a search and run it again in a few months time to see what else has appeared on a particular topic You can save your documents as a Word or PDF file You can link straight through from your search results to the full text of articles we have bought for the library Drawing up a search strategy Before you start searching you need to think a few things through: What are the most important subject areas and words that you will need to include in your search? Are there alternative terms you need to think about? Think PICO. What patients/problems; interventions, controls/comparisons and outcomes are you interested in?

2 Choosing a database Journals and Databases Begin an advanced Search When you get to the Advanced Search option you will be asked to log in with you Athens username and password. Once you have a logged in select a database from the list. We strongly recommend that you only search ONE database at a time as they are all set up differently and this gives much better results. For a thorough search you should probably search at least two databases. Free-text searching Free-text searching is the automatic option on the NHS Evidence databases. Freetext searching searches through the titles and abstracts of journal articles to find an exact match for what you type into the search box. So, for example a search for COPD would find any articles where this term occurs but NOT articles that use Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease without using the acronym. Search for phrases by using double quote marks around them e.g. pressure ulcer Use adj for words near each other e.g. head adj2 injury will find instances where the word head is within two words of the word injury. Use truncation - by adding an * to the end of a word you can search for anything that starts with that stem e.g. depress* will find depression, depressed, depressive, depressing and depressed. When you have done your search click on the number next to your search term in your search history to see the articles on that topic. When you are looking at your results you can go back to the search screen by clicking on Search and Limits at the top of the screen.

3 Subject searching Subject searching uses subject headings given to each article by its author or a team of indexers that are linked to articles on the database. Each subject heading covers all the possible variations of that subject terms so Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive the subject heading used by the database - covers Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Airflow Obstruction, COPD and Airflow Obstruction Chronic. By using the subject searches you can cover lots of different variations of a term with one search. And because the authors or indexers only give subject headings to articles which are properly about that topic subject searching will give you a more focused set of articles which are more closely-linked to what you are looking for. So how do I do subject searching? You can do subject searching by ticking the Map to Thesaurus box underneath the main search box. This will automatically link what you type into the search box with the subjectheading the authors and indexers use to index the articles. On the next screen you can see the Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive subject heading. If you click on the + sign on the left-hand side you can see a list of all the subdivisions of this term, in this case Bronchitis, Chronic and Pulmonary Emphysema.

4 You can automatically include all the articles indexed with these terms by ticking in the explode box. In a similar way you can do a search on Lung Diseases and explode it to automatically include articles on asthma, TB, bronchitis etc. When you have selected your term and if you want to selected the Explode tick box click on Search to look for articles that have been given that subject heading. Combining searches together The best way of searching databases is to break your search down into its individual components and then combine these components together again using AND or OR. This will give you better results and allows you to mix together the ingredients of your search into a wider variety of different combinations. Let s say I want to find out how genetics influences lung disease in people who have been exposed to asbestos. Having done a subject-heading search on Lung Diseases and a search for asbestos (here I ve truncated it to pick up asbestosis as well) I can select my previous searches using the tick-boxes on the left-hand side of the screen and then combine them using AND or OR. AND will find me articles on Lung Diseases and asbestos so this is what I ve selected. Having created a smaller set of search results on lung diseases and

5 asbestos I can now do another search on Genes and add this to my combined set of results on asbestos and lung disease. So in this instance I ve gone in five easy steps from thousands of articles on lung diseases, genes and asbestos to only 74 articles covering all three topics. Note it s possible to combine subject-heading searches with free-text ones and a good search will include both methods of searching. Subject-headings will pick up instances where indexers use terms you might not have thought of whereas freetext searches will pick up terms which either don t have a specific subject heading or where the articles haven t been indexed properly. You can also use OR to combine different searches together. While AND will give you fewer results because you are looking for articles with both topics in OR will broaden your search as you are looking for alternative ways of describing the same topic. OR can be particularly useful when there are a number of different terms for the same thing. In the example below I ve searched for a number of different alternatives for learning disabilities don t forget older articles often used terminology which we find distasteful nowadays then used OR to combine them together to get a larger set of search results. Note I ve used truncation (see above) to cover mental and mentally, handicap and handicapped, disability, disabled and disabilities etc.

6 Limiting your search If you get too many search results or if you are only interested in articles of a particular type you can limit your search results in a number of different ways. To do this click on Apply Limits towards the right-hand side of your search-history table. This will bring up a series of limits which you can use to limit your searches to human or animal studies, to articles within a certain publication date, research carried out with different age groups etc. You can choose as many limits as you want by holding down the Ctrl key but don t forget to click on Clear all limits before you start searching again as otherwise these limits will still be applied to your next search. Switching between databases You can change to another database and carry out the same search in that database to save you having to type all your search terms in again. You can do this by clicking on the Search Another box underneath the search history. You can either re-run the whole of your search or just selected parts of it. NB Because the different databases use different subject headings a subjectheading search in one database might not yield any results in another one. This does not mean that there are no articles on that topic in that database, just that they use a different subject heading. This is why it is a good idea to only search one database at a time.

7 Getting hold of the information You can click on the blue titles of the articles to see a summary, or abstract, of its contents. If you are entitled to access the full text of an article there will be a blue link at the foot of the reference which you can click on to go straight through to the text of the whole article you may also find that an article is available in print at the JET library. Where there is no blue link you will need to speak to the library about ordering articles via inter-library loan. How do I download my results? You can select the articles you are interested in by using the tick boxes to the lefthand side of the articles or the Select All link at the bottom of the page. At the foot of the page you can decide whether you want your results as a PDF or Word document and whether you want just the reference (short) or the reference and the abstract (medium). Finally you can decide whether you want to the results to yourself or save them as a file on your computer.

8 How do I save my searches? You can save your searches by clicking on either Save all or Save selected lines at the top of your search history. You will be asked to give your search a name and then save it so you can keep the results and run it again in the future. Setting up alerts After you ve decided to save a search you can also create an alert which will send you s every time a new article is added to the database on that topic. To set up an alert give your search a name and then click on Save & Create Alert. You will then be asked to provide an address that the s can be sent to and to choose whether you want to receive your s once a week, fortnightly or every month. Recovering searches The databases save your searches for you as you go along so you can recover any lost searches by clicking on Recover Searches at the top of the screen then selecting which searches you want to recover based on the date you carried out a particular search.