literature search resources

searching the biomedical literature at WCU

General Search Tips

To ensure a comprehensive search of the literature, it is important to have a search strategy. There are several articles linked at the bottom of this page describing various search strategies. Here are a few additional tips.

Learn as much as you can about the topic so you can optimize your keywords used in electronic searching. Identifying specific MESH terms can help here. The simplest way to do this is to use the "advanced" search in Pubmed, put in a search term and click "show index".
Find the most recent articles on the topic and use their bibliography for searching backward.
Find the most directly pertinent articles, no matter the date, and look over the articles that cite them.
Identify the key researchers in the field, obtain their published articles, and see who cites them.
Use a citation manager (Mendeley, Zotero, Endnote) to organize your citations and manage your full text articles.
Decide how many articles and what kind of articles you really need for your purpose before you start. A case report will need 3-5 key articles while a major review will need far more.

Finding Full Text of Articles

Start by searching using Medline Complete through the WCU Library. This will automatically access full text where accessible either publicly or through the WCU library database subscriptions. You may be used to Pubmed, which is convenient for a quick look but searches a slightly different dataset and may not access all of the full text available through Medline Complete.
After searching with Medline Complete, follow up with a search using Google Scholar. This is a broad search and can find full text articles posted outside of the usual databases, for example on personal websites, ResearchGate, etc. GS will also let you set up keyword alerts for when new articles on a topic are published or otherwise become available.
At this point, you should curate your bibliography and decide which abstract-only citations are important enough to pursue full text acquisition. Remember that many articles, especially review articles, are duplicated in the literature.
One method that students often do not utilize is to simply contact the corresponding author of the article and ask them to send you an electronic reprint. Their email is usually included with the abstract page or can readily be found at their institution. Authors are proud of their articles and happy to send them to interested parties, normally with a relatively quick turnaround.
If you cannot obtain your full text by any of the above methods, I suggest trying outside resources. Many faculty and students have access to other institutional libraries due to their prior affiliations, especially if they were active researchers before coming to WCU. Make friends! Dr. Bateman has access to the USM library databases, which can sometimes be helpful.
Finally, you do have interlibrary loan available to you at WCU. I put this last because it can be slow and you don't want to depend on it for a lot of articles, but it is there if you need it.