Introduction
Finding articles starts with the question and the key components, concepts, or terms in the question. From there, properly adding additional synonym search terms can help give the search tool you’re using more options to bring you back what you’d like. You can use PubMed’s search details to help you find easy additional search terms that might benefit your search elsewhere. Structuring the search using Boolean (OR, AND, NOT) also optimizes what the database can provide you.
Different search tools have different thesauruses that include terms indexers have defined, then attached to the citation to the article they’ve created. If your search is taking you strange places, looking at how the thesaurus defines the term, or the database’s preferred term, can be helpful.
Creating alerts and saving searches can help you keep up with the literature without having to recreate the search every time.
Search tools that might be of benefit include, but are not limited to:
- PubMed, which has a core of literature helpful to small animal practice
- Dimensions.ai
- Lens.org
- Google Scholar
- Europe PMC
- RCVS Knowledge
- institutional repositories (example, OakTrust at TAMU)
- preprint servers (example, medRxiv)
- Best Bets For Vets
See what additional benefits (perhaps VetMed Resource, Vetlexicon, or others) you have with professional associations you have memberships with (example, Evidence Based Veterinary Medicine Association, American Association of Equine Practitioners, American Association of Swine Veterinarians, etc.) and your local public and academic libraries.
Videos
- Identifying Key Terms Using a Question Development Methodology
- Developing Additional Search Terms from Key Terms
- Speaking the Databases’ Language: Boolean and Phrase Searching
- Understanding Databases and Platforms
- Using PubMed’s Search Details to Improve Your Search
- Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed
- Troubleshoot Your Search
- Google Scholar: Creating Alerts in Google Scholar
- Google Scholar: How and Why to Follow Authors
- Enhancing PubMed: Using a MyNCBI account to email alerts about new articles
