Users' guide to the surgical literature: how to perform a literature search

• Published in: Canadian Journal of Surgery 2003-04, Vol.46 (2), p.136-141
• Main Authors: Birch, Daniel W, Eady, Angela, Robertson, Don, De Pauw, Sonja, Tandan, Ved
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Databases, Bibliographic; Evidence-Based Surgery; General Surgery; Humans; Medical literature; MEDLINE; PubMed; Study & teaching; Surgery
• ISSN: 0008-428X; 1488-2310

Surgeons are instrumental in providing appropriate, cost-effective health care.(7) This responsibility implies that we must try to maintain a standard of care that is consistent with the best available evidence. To pursue an evidence-based approach to surgical care, a surgeon must be able to review relevant articles from the literature in an efficient manner. Therefore, the contemporary surgeon must have a simple mechanism for carrying out a complete literature search. Other publications in this evidence-based surgery series have described how to review various articles from the surgical literature. In this paper, we provide the surgeon with guidelines for searching the literature and a template for constructing an effective search strategy. Once you have developed the clinical question, the next step is to decide which tool you should use to search the literature. Most journal articles relevant to the practising surgeon are indexed in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) MEDLINE database. MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations from over 4000 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. It has more than 10 million citations dating from 1966 to the present. Other databases are available that may be more appropriate for specialized searches of the literature (e.g., EMBASE is a widely used biomedical and pharmaceutical database), but we will focus only on MEDLINE in this discussion. We have provided a simple worksheet to guide you through the process of developing and executing a literature search (Fig. 5). A simple method to search the literature is to use PubMed by accessing the PubMed home page www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed. You can enter your search terms in the search window directly or by using the "Preview/Index" feature. The search terms that you have selected from your clinical question are "text terms." PubMed will search for each of these terms in the index fields (title, abstract) unless otherwise specified. PubMed will automatically combine these terms with the Boolean operator(6) "and," which implies that all terms entered must be found in each record retrieved (which will restrict the focus of the search, whereas the Boolean operator "or" will expand the search).