You NEED to develop your question before you begin searching. Make sure you schedule a meeting with your site coordinator and develop a PICO question with them before beginning developing your search strategy. You should be able to fill out the first page of the Search Strategy Template before you open PubMed or any other database.
When conducting a systematic review, you have almost always identified a few key papers you know you want your search to retrieve. In this class, you are not necessarily working from a pre-existing systematic review but you can use key papers if you have them.
The value of these papers is twofold. First, these papers provide a rich source to identify search terms to represent the concepts in your research question. Second, they can also be used to evaluate your final strategies to ensure you haven’t missed any important terms.
PubMed is a valuable resource for identifying search terms. Each record for a key paper includes a unique ID (PMID), citation, and often an abstract and author supplied keywords. If the article has been indexed for MEDLINE, it will also have a list of assigned MeSH terms, the controlled vocabulary used in PubMed.
Check each key paper you have in PubMed to start gathering ideas of what you'd like to include in your search concepts.
There are eight distinct steps that will assist you in moving through a literature search.
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, or NOT
to refine or broaden your search.Are you interested in different types of reviews? See our guidance on performing specific types of literature reviews.