Our research question is to build a strategy to find research studies reporting on the effectiveness of caps/port protectors for central/venous or peripheral lines/catheters, to prevent bloodstream infections.
Search a database of your choice (or PubMed using instructions on the right) for 'caps AND infections'
Save your results to a file on your desktop
Open up Voyant Tools
Upload the file of PubMed results on your desktop into Voyant tools - click the Upload button
Click on 'Reveal'
The message 'Loading corpus' will display.
You should now see a Voyant display of your results with a Cirrus word cloud in the top left corner and four other boxes of analyses.
You can see some words in the word cloud that are not helpful - time to edit the stopword list
Hover or click near the blue question mark in the top right of the Cirrus word cloud box
Select the two circle icon (Define options for this tool)
Click on Edit list next to Stopwords - autodetect
Add the following to the bottom of the list and then Save: 'doi', 'university' 'pmid', 'author','medline'
Click on Confirm
Watch the cloud reformat
Explore the phrase analysis option in the bottom left hand box.
Click on the Phrases icon
Use the search box below the list of phrases to look for words that might start phrases of interest, for example ‘cap’.
Can you find any phrases that might be of potential interest?
In the central top box, currently titled Reader, hover near the question mark and click on the window icon to choose another tool.
Choose Corpus tools / Collocates
Use the search box below the list of collocates terms to search on words that might be included in potentially useful phrases to include or exclude, e.g. 'bloodstream'.
Could the results help you with terminology for phrase searches or adjacency searches in your search strategy?
Use the KWIC options box (bottom right) to find examples of very irrelevant use of the term 'caps' e.g. 'bathing caps'
Which ones did you find?
Go to the Cirrus box (top left)
Click on the Terms icon
See how safe it is to truncate 'cap' by using the truncation exploration option: ^cap*
What might be the safest option(s) for truncation of this word?
Search for 'caps AND infections'.
Click on Save
Select All results
Select Format Abstract (text)
Click on Create File
Save the file to the desktop