Welcome to the LibGuide for the Nursing Inquiry for Evidence-based Practice course. This resource will help guide you through the searching assignment for this class.
A good search strategy, customized for the database being searched, is the foundation of a good systematic review.
Databases must be searched as comprehensively as possible in order to identify all of the documents relevant to your systematic review. The following components used in comprehensive searching will be covered in your assignment:
You will be developing search strategies for PubMed, Embase and CINAHL for your assigned topic.
Before you start searching, prepare to save your search in a Word document, notepad, excel file, or whatever other format you choose. By saving your search, your strategy will be reproducible for another time and properly documented.
Feel free to use the search strategy template below to document your search strategies for PubMed, Embase and CINAHL.
This searching assignment has been developed to facilitate the timely completion of search strategies for key databases for the purpose of this class. We DO NOT advocate restricting the number of databases searched or the types of strategies that augment database searching (e.g. handsearching and grey literature searching) during the completion of a "real life" systematic review.
For more about the guidelines for a full systematic review, ask your informationist and/or consult the library's guide called "Systematic Reviews and Other Expert Reviews" (also available from the "More about Systematic Reviews" page of this guide).
This section will be updated as we receive questions - please use the feedback form if you have questions!
Thank you.
Does case matter?
- In most databases, case does not matter with the exception of Boolean operators. Boolean operators must be capitalized in all databases.
