LitSearch for Postgraduate Thesis selection (NXPowerLite Copy).ppt

A detailed guideline for Medical PG students for thesis topic selection, choosing articles and managing the originality

1. Literature Search &
Evaluation of Material
“The problem in most technical fields now is
not a shortage of data, but making sense of
the flood of data pouring in - which, as the
saying goes, is like 'trying to drink from a fire
hose.”
Lewis J. Perlman

2. What is a literature search?
–“a detailed, organized, step-by-step search for [all]
material available on a topic”
• How to do a Literature Search. (2006).
Retrieved August 6, 2008 from
http://www.rgu.ac.uk/library/howto/page.cfm?p
ge=25989
•Literature search is necessary to bridge the gap
created by vast outpouring of literature and lack
of time to update oneself regularly.

3. Why do a literature search?

Increases your own knowledge of the subject

Helps you identify work already done or in progress
that is relevant to your own

Prevents you duplicating work already done (and
helps to avoid accusations of plagiarism)

Helps you avoid errors of previous research

Helps you choose / design your own methodology

Enables you to detect ‘gaps’ in current research &
find a unique area for your own
(adapted from Hart, 2001)

4. Evolution of new information into
knowledge

5. Library Vs Web
•Libraries have large collections of information on a
variety of topics, carefully selected and organized.
•The key idea when using the library is that you are
getting QUALITY over QUANTITY. Print or electronic
library resources are the best sources to use when
starting your research.
•The key idea when using the Web is that you get
QUANTITY over QUALITY. The Web is a good tool for
finding information, but it is usually not the best
place to begin academic research.

6. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
Non-Documentary
Internet

7. Primary source
•First published records of original research and
development or description of new application or
new interpretation of an old theme or idea.
Are found in
•Periodicals (journals, research reports, research
monographs, bulletins, transactions), dissertations,
unpublished sources

8. Secondary Source
•Information are those which either are compiled
from or refer to primary sources of information.
Specialise in interpreting and providing opinions on
primary sources of information.
•So, This information is Selected, Modified,
Reorganised
Appear as
•Periodicals, abstracts, bibliographies, reviews,
indexing journals, textbooks, reference books

9. Tertiary Source
Contain information distilled and collected from
primary and secondary sources.
Bibliography of bibliographies
Directories Guide to Literature

10. Tools for locating information
•Library Catalogues (quality monitored)
•Bibliographic databases (quality monitored,
but not always full text)
•Subject Indices and Gateways
•Search Engines
•Microforms

13. Medical bibliographic databases
General
•Medline/Pubmed (
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed)
•EMBASE (www.embase.com/ )
•Scopus (www.scopus.com/scopus/home.url )
Specialist
•Popline (reproductive medicine, sexual health) (
http://db.jhuccp.org/popinform/basic.html)
•The Cochrane Library (Evidence Based Medicine) (
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/mrwho
me/106568753/HOME
)

14. Medical bibliographic databases
•Trip Database (www.tripdatabase.com/index.html )
•Clinical Evidence (
http://clinicalevidence.bmj.com/ceweb/index.jsp)
•Global Health (
www.cabi.org/datapage.asp?iDocID=169 ),
•ISI Web of Knowledge (
http://isiwebofknowledge.com/currentuser_wokho
me/cu_aboutwok
)

15. http://www.biomedcentral.com/gateways/

16. Some open access journals
•Bioline (www.bioline.org.br)
•BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com )
•BMJ (www.bmj.com)
•Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org)
•Free Medical Journals (www.freemedicaljournals.com)
•HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl)
•Institute of Tropical Medicine Library Antwerp (
http://lib.itg.be/journals.htm)
•Open Journals Publishing (Africa) (www.openjournals.net)
•SciELO (www.scielo.org/php/index.php?lang=en)

17. Peer-Reviewed
Journals
Scholarly periodical; each article
submitted for publication is judged,
independently, by a panel of experts
Books:
information likely to be 2 - 3 years
older; difficult to find useful books in
specialised topic
Conference
proceedings
difficult to track down; often
duplicated in journals; full text may
never be published
Reports:
research reports /
technical reports
might not be in public domain and
can be difficult to obtain
Dissertations:
masters/Doctorate
can be difficult to obtain
Official & legal
publications
diverse formats can be confusing;
Level of treatment of the topic varies

18. The Good Bad & the Ugly of Web
The Good:
many sources of authoritative research information now
publish on the Internet
The bad:
A lot of information on internet is completely inappropriate
for your research; Anyone can put anything on the Internet
& say anything they like; change it without warning
The Ugly
Unfortunately there are a lot of sharks on the Internet -
people who want to trick you, misinform you, deceive you
and defraud you.

19. How do you spot the fakes?
•A number of web sites exist to expose fake
sites and frauds.
•Snopes http://www.snopes.com/
•The Office of Fair Trading: Advice on Scams
http://www.oft.gov.uk/oft_at_work/consum
er_initiatives/scams/

•Scambusters http://www.scambusters.com/

21. Types of Questions
Predictive
Historical
Explorative
Attitudinal
Causation
Measurement
Characterisation

22. A structure for formulated questions
•Organize your topic into subject groups or sets
•Analyze the keywords in each subject group or set
to try to find as many relevant search terms as
possible
•Use a thesaurus which lists synonyms and related
words, to help you think of broader and narrower
terms (and alternative spellings).
•Some computer databases have an on-line subject
thesaurus

23. Tools to become better organized -
WISPR
Workshop on Information Search Process & Research

24. A structure for formulated questions
HEALTH SERVICES
RESEARCH
Patient
Intervention
Comparison
Outcome
(PICO)
WITHIN SOCIAL SCIENCES
RESEARCH
Setting
Population
Intervention
Comparison
Evaluation
(SPICE)

25. Developing a Search Strategy
•Strategy 1: “Blockbuilding-approach (BBL)“
to split your search topic in single terms
•Strategy 2: “Citation pearl growing approach“
Means you start with a known citation, may be
a key-article and reuse its keywords, subject-
headings, reference list to find more articles.
Like a snowball system.

26. THE INTERNET
Reference sources
Bibliographies
Subject resources
Data archives and
sources
News & current
awareness
Citation indexes
Electronic journals
Digital collections
Discussion forums
Library catalogues
Research papers
and articles
Statistics & factual
information

27. General Search Engines
Google Most used Search engine
Yahoo
Similiar to google. But different hits and also different
ranking
Vivismo (clusty) Feature: is structuring the search result
Open Access
PLOS Open-Access-Journals. Similar to “Biomedcentral“
Citebase Search
Search engines for for free available documents in the
Internet
Special Search Engines
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.co.uk
Provides search for scholarly literature. Search articles are
ranked where they have been appeared and how often
they have been cited.
MedHunt
www.hon.ch/MedHunt,
produced by the Health On the Net Foundation, provides
access to evaluated sites to improve the quality of
internet searching. This is the most reliable search engine.
Scirus
Search engine for sciences. Sites are ranked dependend
how many links are leading to the sites back. Has more
links to (not free available) journal articles of publishers.

28. A metasearch engine
•sends queries to multiple search engines and other
data sources, then collates the results in some way
and formats them for display.
•AskJeeves , askOnce, BrightPlanet Deep Web Directory
•Copernic Empower, Domino Extended Search (can query
Notes, databases, and search engines) Deep Web Technologies -
searching scientific databases, OpenText Query Server,
Metacrawler

30. Search Strategies: Boolean Operators
•AND (narrows search, retrieving records containing
all of the terms)
•OR (broadens search, retrieving records containing
any of the terms)
•NOT (excludes terms from a search, retrieving
records that do not contain the term following it.)
AND OR NOT

31. AND operator
Welfare reform AND Legislation

32. OR operator
Teenager OR Adolescent

33. NOT operator
Jewelry NOT Silver Jewelry

34. Search Strategies:
Truncation/Wildcard
•Use truncation symbols to search for words with
different endings
* system* = returns records on system, systems,
systematic
•Use ? to represent 1 or no characters:
–behavio?r will find behaviour or behavior
–? wom?n = returns records on both woman and
women (singular and plural forms)
•Use # to represent 1 character
•Organi#ation will find organisation or
organization

35. Search Strategies:
Nesting
•Nesting
–Parenthesis, () keep related terms together
•If searching for an exact phrase, enclose phrase in
quotation marks, “”
•Symbols vary between databases: check the help
screens (* ? $)
•Proximity – ADJ; NEAR or N#; WITH or W#

36. Parenthesis
Gold AND (silver OR Platinum)

38. Mapping
•Vocabulary mapping uses statistical analysis to
determine which subject headings (index terms)
occur most frequently in documents containing
your free text query.
•If you do not know the proper MeSH (Medical
Subject Heading)term to use, the Ovid system has a
unique feature called "mapping" which will help
you. Type in your word or phrase and Ovid will
automatically try to match it with an appropriate
MeSH term.

39. Explode
•A special function called "Explode", available on
most Medlines, allows you to search a broad term
and all the narrower terms associated with it at
once.
•Rather than having to list all antibiotics in a search
statement, e.g. Penicillin OR Ampicillin OR
Amoxicillin …, you can simply say "Explode
Antibiotics" and all antibiotic terms will be OR'd in
the retrieval.

40. Citation searching (Web of Science
feature)
•Find a key reference from (at least) last 5-10 years
and follow all references that cite it
•“Citation pearl growing approach“
Means you start with a known citation, may be
a key-article and reuse its keywords, subject-
headings, reference list to find more articles.
Like a snowball system

41. Peer-to-Peer Search
•which currently means storing files in a directory that
is accessible by people outside a local network.
Essentially, this is file sharing with the entire Internet.
•Lime wire
•Bear Share
•Shareaza

42. Other Methods
•Reference chaining: Follow up references from
reference lists of relevant articles
•Hand searching: Identify key journals in your field
and browse them cover to cover
•Relevance feedback: Look at subject indexing for a
key reference and use to modify your search terms
(Also “See Related Records” features)

43. Evaluating your search strategy
Relevant Not Relevant
Retrieved
Use to generate
additional
search terms
Eliminate terms
with poor yield
Not Retrieved
Use reference
lists from key
articles to
identify these
No further
action required

44. You need to identify and verify your
sources
•Who is the author?
•Who is the publisher?
•Who sponsored or funded the site?
•Do you recognise them as an authoritative source?
•What are their credentials, qualifications,
background and experience?
•Has the information been edited or peer reviewed?
•Do other Internet sources that you trust link to this
site?

45. When- how current is the information?
•How critical is the creation date to your research?
There are times when current information is vital to
your research. For example, up-to-date information
would be essential in researching the following:
–New medical techniques
–Latest statistics
•When was the site created?
•When was the site last updated?

46. Why- determine the purpose
•Is it someone's hobby or personal opinion - not
related to his or her profession?
•Is it a report on a topic that the author is an expert
in?
•Is it selling a product or point of view?
•Is there documentation to support the opinions or
facts given?
•Are the facts well balanced?
•Can you identify where the information came from?

47. look for
•Author details
•Is this on the Web site of their employer or is it their
own personal web site?
•Details about the publisher, sponsor or developer of
the site.
•The About Us section, Mission Statement or Help
•The Contact Details
•Photographs of the author or offices of the
organisation.
•A Copyright Statement
•Consider how you came by the site- was it a link
from a trusted source?

48. Take time to gather evidence about the
content
•Bias and controversial statements that are
unsubstantiated
•Presence or absence of Research evidence
•Proper references
•Mistakes and inaccuracies:

49. Clues from URLs
URL What's this?
http:// Transfer Protocol
www.law.brisServer Name
ac Top Level Domain/Organisational Code
uk Country Code
Research. Directory
interests.htmlFile Name / File Type
http://www.law.bris.ac.uk/research/interests.html

50. More clues: looking at
organisational codes
•.com - a commercial entity
•.edu - an educational institution
•.org - a non-profit organization
•.gov - a government agency
•.mil - a military organization
•.net - a computer network or technical
group
•.us, .uk., etc. - country designations
•.biz, .info, etc – new for business, etc.

51. More clues: looking at country
codes
•You can sometimes find out more information
about the country in which the server is based from
the country code. For example:
•.au Australia
•.ca Canada
•.de Germany
•.fr France
•.uk United kingdom

52. Citation Index
•A citation index is an index of citations between
publications, allowing the user to easily establish
which later documents cite which earlier
documents.

53. Impact Factor
•It is frequently used as a proxy for the importance of
a journal to its field.
•For example, the 2003 impact factor of a journal
would be calculated as follows:
•A = the number of times articles published in 2001-2
were cited in indexed journals during 2003
•B = the number of "citable items" (usually articles,
reviews, proceedings or notes; not editorials and
letters-to-the-Editor) published in 2001-2
•2003 impact factor = A/B

54. PageRank
•Relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the
web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of
an individual page's value. In essence, Google
interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote,
by page A, for page B.
•It also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes
cast by pages that are themselves "important"
weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
"important".

55. Plagiarism
http://www.liunet.edu/cwis/cwp/library/workbook/evaluate.htm
•“If you use someone else's words or ideas without
crediting them, you are committing plagiarism.
•It can be as obvious as turning in another person's
paper or project as your own or as subtle as
paraphrasing sections of various works.
•Take clear, accurate notes about where you found
specific ideas. Write down the complete citation
information for each item you use.
•Use quotation marks when directly stating another
person's words. Always credit original authors for
their information and ideas”.