Literature Searching: Searching databases

CINAHL provides indexing for more than 5,500 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health.
Access via https://library.svhg.ie/ pink e-journals and databases box on left or via your OpenAthens login externally.

Basic CINAHL Searching Tutorial              

Advanced CINAHL Searching Tutorial     

TRIP is a medical search engine, available through SVUH, with an emphasis on evidence based medicine (EBM) and clinical guidelines. A short introduction to searching Trip.

PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. 

• Tips for Using NLM’s PubMed
• PubMed Subject search: How it works
• Searching for MeSH Terms
• Literature searching in PubMed and Google Scholar - older but has good explanations.

Advanced PubMed searching:

• Searching PubMed - a playlist - A series of short videos by @carrieprice78 showing how to find the most relevant results for your search using its various tools.

These tutorials show how to create an NCBI account, define the difference between a Medical Subject Heading and a keyword, execute an effective search using both Medical Subject Headings and keywords, employ field tags, set up a search alert, and navigate basic and advanced searches.

• Video tutorial – Welch Medical Library
• NLM step by step searching guide

• Scopus is a multidisciplinary abstract and citation database which indexes journal articles, books and conference proceedings from the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. The database is used by many researchers to find citation information – eg.how often an article has been cited in other publications – as well as for author information, including number of publications and h-index.
• SVUH does not have a subscription to Scopus. Staff can access the database through the UCD network in SVUH library with a UCD Connect account. Please contact us for details.
• Scopus Preview is a free interface which allows non-subscribed users access to some features. This allows you to search for author information, Scopus sources (the list of indexed journal titles, books etc) and CiteScore (a metric for citation impact over four years). Access Scopus Preview here.

Search tips:
1.    Unlike Medline, CINAHL etc, Scopus does not use a controlled vocabulary to support subject searching. Use the dropdown box to select "Article Title, Abstract, Keywords" to find words in these fields of the documents.

2.    Use quotation marks "" to search for phrases. Scopus treats this as a “loose phrase,” meaning that the words must be together, in either order, in the fields you are searching.
3.    Scopus uses autocorrect which can alter your search. Use curly brackets {} to force Scopus to search for exact words or phrases
4.    Search one concept at a time and combine using AND
 
5.    You can also combine complex searches in Search history 

Students4BestEvidence: A network for students interested in evidence-based healthcare
Sensitivity and specificity explained (Students for Best Evidence)                                            
How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists