Introduction to structured searching

This course provides an introduction to structured searching.

It is intended for health professionals working at SA Health.

The aim of this course is to assist you to construct a comprehensive, methodical search strategy in Medline in order to answer a clinical question.

Learning objectives:

1. Learn how to formulate a clinical question

2. Identify search concepts

3. Translate search concepts into search terms

4. Understand the difference between free text terms and medical subject headings (MeSH)

5. Using a clinical question, formulate a comprehensive search strategy using the Boolean operators AND and OR

6. Enter a search strategy into Medline