Pharmacy Literature Search Skills

Evidence summaries, systematic reviews, and guidelines are great starting points, but often you’ll need to search the primary journal literature:

• Many topics have not had evidence summaries written about them yet
• It takes time for new studies to be reflected in summary documents
• The general recommendations in summaries may not apply to your particular patient scenario

Databases such as Ovid Medline, PubMed, and Embase are tools that help you find peer-reviewed, high quality research studies. 

1) Formulate your question and identify main concepts

Before searching a database, you must define your research question and identify main concepts to search. Doing this makes it easier to identify and combine appropriate search terms, and increases the chances of retrieving relevant results. One common way to define your question is by using the PICO framework. Not all research questions fit within PICO; using a framework matters less than identifying 2-3 main concepts to build your search with.

2) Find synonyms for your main concepts

Once you have defined your question and have identified main concepts, the next step is to think of synonyms, or other ways authors may express the concepts you're looking for. Some things to consider:

Terms that have the same meaning:

Hyperlipidemia / High cholesterol

Terms that have alternate spellings:

Pediatric / Paediatric

Acronyms:

SARS / Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Umbrella terms and specific conditions:

Sexually-transmitted infections / Herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc.

Keywords and database-specific subject headings:

Cancer, tumour, tumor, carcinoma / Neoplasms (MeSH)

Discipline-specific jargon:

Occupational justice / Unemployment, underemployed

Using AND, OR, NOT (Boolean Operators)

Incorporating Boolean operators into your search strategy will make your search more efficient and allow you to combine multiple search queries into one search.

OR: Combines terms for the same concept

                                e.g. teenagers or adolescents or youth

AND: Combines different concepts

                                e.g. teenagers AND mental health

NOT: Use to exclude a concept (be cautious, you may lose relevant articles!)

                                e.g. mental health NOT depression

Note: Use brackets to group concepts together and force an order of operations.

e.g. (teenagers OR adolescents OR youth) AND ((mental health OR mental illness) NOT depression)

A Venn diagram can help visualize how Boolean operators work. Keywords and subject headings are combined using OR. Concepts (e.g. P, I, C, O) are combined using AND.

Note that many questions you may be researching will not fit neatly into a PICO format. Even if they do fit, it's generally not a good idea to include all elements of your PICO in your database search. It's often best to start with the P and I, or the I and O elements. Note that outcomes can be difficult to search for, as they are often not thoroughly or consistently reported in the information that a database searches.

Optionally, you may want to add some words to your search that describe study design. There are a number of search filters or hedges - pre-constructed searches you can copy and paste - available that help you to search by study design. One source is the ISSG Search Filter Resource: