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Patient-Oriented Research and Community-Based Health Research

Specialized databases

General databases

Tips for searching article databases

  1. First do a search for the patient/public engagement concept using keywords and subject headings. 
  2. Next search for a second concept (such as wellness).
  3. Then combine using AND.  

These search terms from PCORI may give you some ideas for keywords to use in your search. Language used to describe patient and public involvement in academic literature varies widely, so you may need to include many synonyms to do a comprehensive search.  

Note that in most databases, an asterisk at the end of a term will search for any words starting with those letters:

participa* will find participation, participatory, participants, etc

For more search techniques you can use in common academic databases, please see this guide

 

Subject headings

Many databases have subject headings you can use in your search to find more relevant results. For instance, Ovid Medline (and PubMed) includes the MeSH terms Patient Participation and Community-Based Participatory Research.

For more general information on searching Ovid Medline and CINAHL with subject headings and keywords, please see these tutorials: