University of Dundee

School of Nursing and Midwifery

Literature Searching
A step-by-step guide

[Version 1.0 April 2014]

Contents
Page
When should you do a literature search?

The five stages of a systematic literature search

Defining the scope of your search

3
3

Using PICO to define your search question

Mapping your search question

Refining your search with Limits

Choosing the tool with which to search

Identifying the kind of resources you are looking for

Table of search tools available
Constructing your search

Free-text searching using Boolean connections

Truncation

Wildcards

Phrase searching

Concept grouping

Creating a free-text strategy

Controlled language searching using thesauri

Different controlled language thesauri

Further assistance

8
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Literature Searching a step-by-step guide

When should I do a literature search?
Any piece of written work you are required to do should involve a literature search. The literature
search is the groundwork for your essay or project all the key readings that you need to use will
be retrieved if your literature search is effective.
What does the literature search involve?
The literature search has five main stages;
1. Defining the scope of the search - how to define a search question, how to decide what
type of resources you wish to include and/or exclude
2. Choosing the tool with which to search - how to choose the correct search tool (e.g.
Library Search, Medline, CINAHL, Google Scholar and others).
3. Constructing the search choosing the most appropriate terms to use in your search
(using controlled language systems such as MeSH or CINAHL headings), using search syntax
(Boolean operators, truncation, wildcards, proximity searching, search limits and filters,
citation searches).
4. Conducting the search using a specific database to run a search strategy
5. Accessing the results of the search how to access full-text information from the range
of electronic resources available from the University of Dundee Library
Each of the above stages is equally important. This guide will take you through stages 1 to 3, and
there are separate guides for Medline & CINAHL to take you through stages 4 & 5.

1. Defining the scope of the search

How to define a search question

How to decide what type of resources you wish to include and/or exclude from your search

Using PICO to define the basic elements of your search

Within health and medicine, we can use the PICO method to identify specific aspects of a search topic. This
is useful if we are going on to do a piece of research, but is also helpful for deconstructing the topic as above.
PICO is an acronym, with the four letters representing search components as follows;
P
I
C
O

= Population (or Patient group)

= Intervention (i.e. the treatment, drug or therapy being tested)
= Comparison (who the population or patient group are being compared with)
= Outcome (what improvement or otherwise will be measured)

Here is another example of a search topic

Is the use of a gastric band a surgically reliable means of addressing morbid obesity in older women?
Using PICO we could define the separate aspects of the search as
Population Intervention Comparison Outcome -

morbidly obese older women (we need to define how old is older?)
the use of a gastric band
morbidly obese older women patients where a gastric band has not been used
more effective management/reduction of obesity
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Mapping your search question

In order to search a database effectively you will need to have a clear understanding of the topics you wish
to search for. Most search topics will be made up of several distinct topics. For instance, a search for
information on the following topic
Is obesity associated with insulin resistance in teenagers?
If we deconstruct this search topic we see that it contains several concepts or ideas as part of the overall
search topic, as follows;

Obesity
Insulin resistance
Teenagers

The topics you have identified will, however, have a number of related terms synonymous with the ones
you have identified or similar in some way, e.g.
Obesity
o Obese, Morbid Obesity, Morbidly Obese, Overweight, Body Mass Index, BMI
Insulin resistance
o Insulin, Diabetes, Diabetic, Type 1 Diabetes
Teenagers
o Adolescents, Adolescence, Young people, Young adults, Youths
Each one of these groups of connected terms will form a separate search in whichever database(s) or search
tools we choose to use; they will be combined later to create a search strategy. It might be helpful to
summarise your search map in some way in order to visualise what the search strategy should include, or
exclude, e.g.

Results which will have most relevance

ObesityOR ObeseOR
OverweightOR Body
MassIndexORBMI

TeenagersOR
AdolescentsOR
YoungPeopleOR
YoungAdultsOR
Youths

InsulinResistance
OR InsulinOR
DiabetesOR Type
1Diabtetes

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Other factors to help refine your search strategy

The scope of your search may also be limited by factors other than the subject or topic. Ask yourself the
following questions;
How far back in time should my search go?
Do I only want results from English language journals or books?
Do I only want results from UK sources?
Do I only want specific kinds of resource (e.g. journal articles, drug trials, statistics)?
Your search can be refined by specifying one or more of the restrictions listed above, with most database
search tools offering a common range of search limits.

2. Choosing the tool with which to search

Matching your information requirements with the right tool for the job

Identifying the kind of resources you wish to search for

At this stage you should decide the kind of information youre interested in locating. It could be one or more
of the following;
Basic information, i.e. from textbooks, dictionaries or encyclopaedias
Research information, i.e. from journal articles or conference papers
Results of drug or treatment trials
Guidelines or standards for clinical practice
Patient information
Each of these different types of resource requires a different search tool in order to locate suitable material.
Some of the resources you will need to use are free-text tools while others use controlled language. The
difference between these is explained in Section 3. Although different tools will look different on the surface,
most of them follow a set of standards for search techniques
The table below gives an indication of the most appropriate tool(s) to use for your different information
requirements (the LLC produces guides for searching using Medline & CINAHL which can be downloaded
from the LLC website).

Type of resource

Search tool to use

Type of
database

Basic
information

textbooks,
dictionaries, encyclopaedias

Library Search

Free-text

Wikipedia

Free-text

Medline (medicine)

Thesaurus

PubMed (medicine)

Thesaurus

CINAHL (nursing)

Thesaurus

SCOPUS (sciences)

Free-text

Web of Knowledge (all subjects)

Free-text

Research information conference papers

Web of Knowledge

Free-text

Results of drug or treatment trials metaanalyses, systematic reviews, reports of

randomised controlled trials (RCTs)

Cochrane database

Free-text

TRIP (Turning Research Into Practice)

Free-text

Guidelines or standards for clinical practice

SIGN guidelines, NICE, etc

TRIP

Free-text

Patient Information from NHS, voluntary

or commercial organisations

TRIP

Free-text

Research information journal articles

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3. Constructing your systematic search

Free-text searching using AND, OR & NOT (Boolean
searching)

Boolean Connectors
Image from http://tarlab.usu.edu/htm/ir/library-searchmethods

The example from Section1 provides an indication of how difficult a task

it can sometimes be to gather all the appropriate terms together which
your search should include, e.g.

Obesity
o Obese, Morbid Obesity, Morbidly Obese,
Overweight, Body Mass Index
Insulin resistance
o Insulin, Diabetes, Diabetic, Type 1 Diabetes
Teenagers
o Teenage, Teenaged, Adolescent, Adolescents,
Adolescence, Young people, Young adults,
Youth, Youths

A search for all these topics would require our strategy to connect them
in a coherent way, e.g.

Obesity OR Obese OR Morbid Obesity OR Morbidly Obese OR Overweight OR Body Mass Index
OR BMI

We use OR to indicate that either topic is required, allowing us to broaden the search to include all
synonymous or related topics. If we were to extend this approach to the whole of our search topic, it might
look like this;
Obesity OR Obese OR Morbid Obesity OR Morbidly Obese OR Overweight OR Body Mass Index
OR BMI
AND

Insulin resistance OR Insulin OR Diabetic OR Diabetes OR Type 1 Diabetes

AND

Teenage OR Teenaged OR Teenagers OR Adolescent OR Adolescents OR Adolescence OR Young

People OR Young Adults OR Youth OR Youths

We use AND to indicate that both or all topics must be present, allowing us to narrow or focus our
search. The use of these connecting words (sometimes known as Boolean connectors) is the essence of a
search strategy. A third Boolean connector, NOT is also used sometimes. Adding NOT Scotland to the
above strategy would exclude all resources where the word Scotland appears.
This approach to searching, where all terms, related or synonymous, are included in the strategy, often results
in a highly complex and time-consuming strategy. It is therefore useful to know how to use a few short cuts
to make our search strategy less complex. The following syntax tools are common to many databases, and
are used as follows;
Truncation
Some words begin with the same letters, so we can use a symbol (usually an asterisk *) to replace missing
letters to allow all words starting with the same sequence of letters to be received, e.g.

obes* would retrieve obese and obesity

adolesc* would retrieve adolescent, adolescents and adolescence
psychi* would retrieve psychiatry, psychiatric, psychiatrist and psychiatrists, but also psychic (which you
may not wanted to include)

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Wildcards
Words which differ according to whether plural or singular or words which differ because of spelling
conventions can make our strategy more complex. Medical terminology, in particular, has many variant
spellings due to European & American spelling variations. A wildcard symbol (usually ? or $) can be used in
place of variations in spelling within a word, e.g.

p?diatric would retrieve paediatric and pediatric

tum?r would retrieve tumour and tumor

For words with different endings in American and European conventions such as center/centre or
theater/theatre you would use the truncation, e.g.

tumo*
theat*

Phrase searches
If a concept or topic is only meaningful if represented by more than one word, e.g. cardiac arrest or morbid
obesity then those words can be searched for as a phrase by enclosing them in double inverted commas or
speech marks, e.g.

searching for insulin resistance would retrieve resources where it might say that the patient
had a resistance to taking insulin at the required time
whereas searching for insulin resistance would retrieve resources where it might say the
patient had strong insulin resistance

A phrase search therefore preserves the meaning of a concept by searching verbatim for the words appearing
inside the speech marks, in that order.
Concept grouping
To group together words or phrases or topics you wish to include as one concept (usually using OR to
link them) you would enclose them in brackets, e.g.

(insulin resistance OR diabet*)

(teenag* OR adolesc* OR young people OR young adults)

Using this approach allows you to group together alternative words or phrases for the same concept or topic
to make your search strategy a more visual representation of what youre trying to locate. You can even use
brackets within brackets if necessary, e.g.

(insulin resistance OR (diabet* AND type 1))

Using multiple aspects of free-text syntax to create a strategy

The above approaches can all be combined to develop complex search strategies or strings as they are
sometimes known. If we were searching for resources on how physical activity affects adolescents with Type 1
diabetes or insulin resistance, e.g.

(insulin resistance OR (diabet* AND type 1)) AND (teenag* OR adolesc* OR young
people OR young adults) AND (exercise OR recreation OR physical activity)

Controlled Language/Thesaurus searching

Using a free-text searching approach, you will need to use your knowledge of a topic to identify the possible
words or topics to be used. Some databases assist you with this process by providing a thesaurus of accepted
terms, allowing you to perform what are known as controlled language searches.
If we use our example from above where there are many variations in the terminology which might be
relevant to the search we can end up with a complex search string, e.g.

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Teenage OR Teenaged OR Teenagers OR Adolescent OR Adolescents OR Adolescence OR Young

People OR Young Adults OR Youth OR Youths

We can simplify this string using a controlled language thesaurus to establish which of the many variant
words we should use. For instance, the thesaurus might suggest that the correct word for this group of
concepts is adolescents. Searching for adolescents would therefore retrieve Teenage or Teenaged or
Teenagers or Adolescent or Adolescence or Young People or Young Adults or Youth or Youths, as well as
Adolescents.
Our complex strategy could therefore be simplified from

to

(insulin resistance OR (diabet* AND type 1)) AND (teenag* OR adolesc* OR young
people OR young adults) AND (exercise OR recreation OR physical activity)

(insulin resistance OR diabetes mellitus, type 1) AND adolescents AND exercise

Controlled language searches therefore give us more power when we search, allowing us to more results
with less effort, and dont require us to know all the possible variant terms or words for our topic.
Different controlled language thesauri
Not all databases use a controlled language approach; however, the two key databases in the health sciences
do use extensive and extremely helpful thesaurus tools. Medline uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and
CINAHL Plus uses CINAHL Headings. Both are covered in detail in the guides to Medline and CINAHL,
also available from the LLC.

Summary
The process of literature searching is not always simple, and you should always follow the key stages before
you start to search a database the planning stage is crucial. At higher levels of study (Masters and above)
you may be asked to provide a rationale for your search strategy, and at PhD level you will need to identify
a comprehensive strategy with considered reasons for including or excluding certain topics or types of
resource. It therefore makes sense to learn the systematic approach as soon as possible, and not to simply
type topics into Google and hope for high-quality peer-reviewed results. This guide, along with guides to
specific databases such as CINAHL & Medline, should give some structure to the process, but the best way
to learn is to have a go!

Further help with literature searching

The LLC provides classroom-based training and support for students engaged
in literature searching and can also work with you one-to-one or in small
groups, but if you are a distance learner and are unable to make use of direct
support, it may be possible to assist you online or via telephone.
For further help, please contact LLC-Liaison-CMDN@dundee.ac.uk

Version number :
Last updated :
Created by :
Location :

V1.1
15/7/2014
AJ
S:\DEPS\Liaison\CMDN \Learning & Teaching Materials by School\School of Nursing &
Midwifery\Leaflets & Guides\How to search for literature.doc

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