The British School of Osteopathy 275 Borough High Street, London SE1 1JE Critical Analysis And Enquiry I Orientation Phase Learning Resource Pack I Searching for Literature Produced by Jo Dear MSc, BSc (Hons) BSO 2006
COPYRIGHT Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, criticism or review, as permitted under the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may not be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the British School of Osteopathy, or in the case of reprographic reproduction only in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency in the UK, or in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the appropriate Reproduction Rights Organisation outside the UK. Enquires concerning reproduction outside the terms stated here should be sent to the British School of Osteopathy.
Searching for Literature (CAE1) The aim of this Learning Resource Pack (LRP) is to introduce you to the skills and resources available to you at the BSO for searching for literature in predominantly peer reviewed journals. The skills and resources outlined here will help you to prepare for your Synopsis of Literature assessment in PDL (CAE1). By the end of this study guide you should be able to: Identify key words relevant to your own personal area of research interest. Find and utilise appropriate MeSH headings. Complete and record an appropriate search of the literature using a database such as PubMed. Key Text In preparation for your Synopsis of Literature assessment, it is recommended that you read the text: Greenhalgh, T. (1997). How to read a paper: the basics of evidence based medicine. BMJ Publishing Group; London. This text is available in the BSO library and can be accessed via the British Medical Journal Website at http://www.bmj.com. Key Resources Available for Searching Literature There are several key resources available to you as students of the BSO for locating and searching for literature. The BSO library houses one of the largest collections of osteopathic literature in Europe and you should familiarise yourself with both the librarians (Will Podmore & Claire Baron) and collection of reference, archive and journal material as soon as possible. As registered students of the University of Bedfordshire, you also have access to the library and online resources provided by the Learning Resource Centre at the University. This effectively allows you to widen your search for literature beyond osteopathy into associated health care professions to include physiotherapy, chiropractic, nursing and medicine. There are a number of ways to locate and search for literature, with one of the easiest being to use the online, freely accessible database PubMed (http://www.pubmed.gov). PubMed is the service of the US National Library of Medicine, which includes over 16 million citations of work associated with medicine and the life sciences.
PubMed is not the only database available to you and listed below are some of the more frequently used databases. Cochrane library for quality controlled systematic reviews & RCT s - www.nelh.nhs.uk/cochrane (freely available online) AMED - Allied & Complementary Medicine (via University of Beds) - Professions allied to medicine - Complementary medicine - Palliative care BNI - British Nursing Index (via University of Beds) - Nursing & Midwifery focus - Contemporary British literature CINAHL - Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature (via University of Beds) - Nursing & allied health disciplines - International focus MIDIRS (via University of Beds) - Collection relating to midwifery, obstetrics & child birth care. Psychinfo (via University of Beds) - International psychological index child development OSTMED (freely available online). The list of databases included in this LRP is by no means a complete list. Please spend some time familiarising yourself with the Learning Resources available to you via the University of Bedfordshire. This can be achieved online by visiting the University website at www.beds.ac.uk. Beginning Your Search for Literature Before you begin your search for literature it is essential that you clarify the field and topic of interest. In the PDL unit we ask you to prepare a synopsis of literature in an area of personal interest. Your area of interest might combine your previous experiences or it might be an area which you have recently been introduced to in the BOst programme. There are no limits on what you might want to research other than it must have some relevance to osteopathy and osteopaths in general. Once you have identified an area of interest, it is useful to break this area down into keywords that can be used to guide your search of the literature. For example, an area of interest might be to explore the use of exercise in the treatment and management of low back pain. By phrasing your area of interest into concepts, this allows us to identify keywords and ensure that your search becomes neither to complicated or too vague. Is the use of exercise effective in the treatment & management of low back pain. The words underlined can now become our keywords that define our search and can be used to search databases such as PubMed.
Sometimes keywords do not provide as specific a search of the literature as we might like and we identify too many articles within a database, a number of which may not be relevant to our own identified area of interest. Using the example of osteopathy, if we enter this term as a keyword into PubMed, we retrieve over 292,000 citations! It would be impossible to search through all of those to identify articles of interest and so we can use MeSH Headings to help us. MeSH is specific to the PubMed database and is the National Library of Medicines controlled vocabulary for indexing citations. By using MeSH terminology, you are using a consistent method of retrieving information that may use different terminology for the same concepts. Searching for osteopathy as a MeSH heading provides us with the terminology osteopathic medicine. By now using this MeSH heading as a search term, it reduces our retrieved citations from 292,000 to 2,000. This search can be narrowed further by searching osteopathic medicine as a major topic, reducing the retrieved articles to 1,600. Combining MeSH headings is a useful search strategy and this can often result in a tailored search of the literature. Limiting your search, using the limits option available in PubMed, can narrow the search further. Limiting your search to include for example only those articles available with abstracts, articles in English only, dates of publication within the last 10 years (to ensure that you are using only the most current evidence available) and those which use only human subjects will ensure that you are retrieving literature which is of most use to you. Explore the limits section of PubMed and see what a difference it can make to the specificity of your search. Saving & Recording Your Search It is important that you save and accurately record your search of the literature as this allows both you and us to see where you have searched (i.e. which databases and journals), the keywords and MeSH headings used and how successful your search has been, commonly referred to as the number of hits achieved. It is important that you save your search strategy and present this in the Synopsis of Literature assessment. An example of a search strategy: Search terms Database Limits No.of hits Osteopathy AND PubMed None 1982 low back pain Osteopathy AND PubMed English 925 Low back pain Human Abstracts Osteopathy AND PubMed As above 590 Low back pain AND treatment
It is common practice to save your searches using the clipboard option available in the send to selection via PubMed. The clipboard allows you to store up to 500 items (search details/ abstracts). Please be aware that the clipboard items delete after a period of eight hours inactivity so be sure to save the searches in a more secure location on your computer. When you have found abstracts of papers which you feel are relevant to your area of interest and maybe suitable for inclusion in your synopsis of literature, you need to read the full text of the paper. There are a number of ways in which you can access full text papers and these are outlined below: Retrieval via the BSO library The BSO library has an extensive catalogue of materials including journals. Please spend some time familiarising yourself with the journal catalogue as you may find that the papers you are seeking are held within the library. Requesting a Paper via the BSO library In some instances you may not find the paper you are looking for in the library journal holdings. If this is the case, do not despair. The BSO provides a retrieval service for students where by on receipt of a full reference (Author Surname, Initial. (Year of publication). Title of article. Journal name, (Vol), Issue; page number) the paper can be ordered for you. This service usually takes between 7-10 days and is free to you but you do have a limited number of papers which can be ordered in one academic year. Please ask Will Podmore or Claire Baron for further information. Access to free Fulltext papers online In some instances you might find that papers are available free online. When searching PubMed, the icon below denotes free access. If you notice an icon similar to the one shown below, this may mean that publishers are offering free online registration which can often lead to free full text papers.