Asking the right questions
Phil Wiffen in Evidence-based Pharmacy, 2017
Although Medline is fairly comprehensive for clinical enquiries, it has a strong US bias and may not be the best source of references when looking for wider topics or other aspects of healthcare. There are other more appropriate databases for different areas, namely HealthPlan for health management, and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Literature) for nursing and the allied professions. Embase (the electronic version of the printed Excerpta Medica) has a better coverage of European journals and also includes more references to drugs and therapeutics articles. International Pharmaceutical Abstracts covers a wide range of pharmacy and pharmacology. There is a great deal of overlap between these databases, but as no single one can deliver a complete picture, several often need to be used.
Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Christopher H. Schmid, Theo Stijnen, Ian R. White in Handbook of Meta-Analysis, 2020
The PICOS elements motivate the strategy for searching the relevant literature using a variety of sources to address research questions. Bibliographic databases such as Medline or PsycINFO are updated continually and are freely available to the public. Medline, maintained by the US National Library of Medicine since 1964, indexes more than 5500 biomedical journals and more than 20 million items with thousands added each day. A large majority are English language publications. Other databases are available through an annual paid subscription. EMBASE, published by Elsevier, indexes 7500 journals and more than 20 million items in healthcare. Although it overlaps substantially with Medline, it includes more European journals. Other databases provide registries of specific types of publications. The Cochrane Controlled Trials Registry is part of the Cochrane Library and indexes more than 500,000 controlled trials identified through manual searches by volunteers in Cochrane review groups. Many other databases are more specific to subject matter areas. CINAHL covers nursing and allied health fields in more than 1600 journals; PsycINFO covers more than 2000 journals related to psychology; and CAB (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau) indexes nearly 10,000 journals, books, and proceedings in applied life sciences and agriculture. Sources like Google Scholar are broader but less well-defined making structured, reproducible searches more difficult to carry out and complicating the capture of all relevant articles.
Evidence-based medicine and medical informatics
David M. Luesley, Mark D. Kilby in Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 2016
There are numerous different library databases; different databases index different journals and they may be general or topic specific. MEDLINE is produced by the US National Library of Medicine and is widely available free of charge through PubMed. EMBASE has a greater European emphasis in terms of the journals it indexes and has a higher level of pharmacologic, content. Nursing and midwifery research may not be indexed by MEDLINE or EMBASE: to find such research, databases such as MIDIRS, BNI and CINAHL should be searched. Psychological literature is indexed on Psychinfo or Psychlit. The best resource for high-quality systematic reviews is the Cochrane Library: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR)Database of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE)Health Technology Assessment Database (HTA) (this includes UK and international HTA assessments).
Scoping Review of Cannabis-Reduction Psychosocial Interventions and Reasons for Use among Young Adults with Psychosis
Published in Journal of Dual Diagnosis, 2023
Ryan Petros, Denise D. Walker, Adam Pierce, Maria Monroe-DeVita
The review was conducted according to protocols delineated in the scoping review extension of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA-ScR) (Tricco et al., 2018). The search protocol was not registered before conducting the search. We have included the full search strings for each database in Table 1 to increase transparency of our methods. The research team partnered with University of Washington librarian, Lynly Beard, to conduct a search of English-language literature on December 15th, 2022 using three databases: PubMed, Embase, and PsycINFO. PubMed is a free search engine that broadly includes biomedical and life sciences literature. Embase covers an international collection of biomedical and clinical services research. PsycINFO includes academic and practice research in behavioral health disciplines. The team reasoned that these three databases would identify relevant literature published domestically and internationally in biomedical and behavioral health journals, including open access sources.
A scoping review of asthma and machine learning
Published in Journal of Asthma, 2023
Ulfat A. Khanam,, Zhiwei Gao,, Darryl Adamko,, Anthony Kusalik,, Donna C. Rennie,, Donna Goodridge,, Luan Chu,, Joshua A. Lawson,
We performed a comprehensive literature search between December 2019 and February 2020 using three electronic databases: PubMed, ProQuest, and Embase Scopus databases. We searched again in September 2020 to obtain more recent publications. We considered all literature from the databases until September 2020. PubMed covers the area of medicine, nursing, health care systems, preclinical sciences, and biomedical and life sciences. ProQuest covers the area of public health information and research. Embase covers a wide range of core and niche scientific, medical, and healthcare disciplines. Keywords such as ‘asthma’, ‘wheeze’, ‘machine learning’, ‘human’, ‘cluster’, ‘hierarchical’, ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘naive Bayes’, ‘k nearest neighbor’, ‘k means clustering’, ‘decision tree’, ‘support vector machine’, ‘principal component analysis’, ‘hidden Markov model’, ‘Bayesian network’, ‘random forest’, ‘gradient boosting model’, ‘regression’, ‘artificial neural network’, and ‘deep learning’ were used to search for literature in all three databases. All citations were imported into Mendeley reference manager to create a single Research Information Systems (RIS) file. The RIS file was then imported into the Web-based systematic review software DistillerSR (Evidence Partners, Ottawa, ON) to remove duplicates and help screen titles and abstracts.
Strategies to increase uptake of maternal pertussis vaccination
Published in Expert Review of Vaccines, 2021
Kavin M. Patel, Laia Vazquez Guillamet, Lauren Pischel, Mallory K. Ellingson, Azucena Bardají, Saad B. Omer
A systematic review of the literature was performed to identify strategies to promote uptake of maternal pertussis vaccination. Six databases were selected for different reasons. MEDLINE (via PubMed) provides a comprehensive listing of biomedical journals part of the National Library of Medicine. EMBASE was selected given its inclusion of more international journals. CINAHL was selected to identify literature from nursing and allied health professionals. CENTRAL was selected to identify trials including those found on clinicaltrials.gov, the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and those published only in conference proceedings. Finally, biomedical preprint servers (MedRxiv and BioRxiv) were selected to identify newer studies that had yet to be published in peer reviewed journals. Specific search terms for individual databases were devised. The search strategy template can be found in Table 1.
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