Medline
Medline provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, Medline uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities (how exciting!) to search citations from nearly 6000 biomedical journals. Medline is available on a number of subscription-based platforms including EBSCO, Ovid, as well as a free interface referred to as PubMed. For the purposes of this assignment I recommend:
Help with Medline (EBSCO): please refer to the following videos:
Searching for Research Articles
Methodological Search Filters
By using terms that are frequently used to label or describe methodologies, search filters attempt to restrict database search results to only those that employ these methodologies. Typically, they are used in combination with a search on a specific topic to retrieve results that have a greater likelihood of being an actual research study. I suggest you copy and past the following into Medline (Ovid) and use the search history feature to combine them with your topic search.
Quantitative:
(study OR trial OR retrospective OR prospective OR "case control" OR cohort OR longitudinal OR observational OR random* OR "quasi experimental" OR pilot OR multicent* OR "multi cent*" OR "cross over" OR reliability OR validity OR survey).
The InterTASC Information Specialists' Sub-Group (ISSG) is the group of information professionals supporting research groups within England and Scotland providing technology assessments to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and other associated Information Specialists. They have developed very specific search filters to limit results to the following quantitative research methodologies: epidemiological studies, non-randomized studies, observational studies, and randomized controlled trials/experiments.
Qualitative:
(Qualitative OR Themes OR Interview*)
Booth, A. (2016). Searching for qualitative research for inclusion in systematic reviews: A structured methodological review. Systematic Reviews, 5, 74. doi:10.1186/s13643-016-0249-x