Search Strategy

Sample Question: Is there a link between psychological stress and the onset of breast cancer?

Some of the questions you need to ask yourself include:
1.	What are the main keywords or facets of the question?	Causative agent -- psychological stress Disease -- breast cancer
2.	How do the facets or keywords relate? Are they synonyms? How will you combine your terms?	Both facets must be discussed psychological stress AND breast cancer
3.	How much and what kind of information do you need?	For the purpose of the tutorial lets look at all the options listed below. Small number of relevant references (20-50) Overview of the literature Comprehensive Search (for a Literature Review) Clinical Evidence for use in practice -- see EBM Tutorial

Practical Session

The next screen is divided into 2 frames.
The Left frame holds the tutorial instructions. In the right frame is a Database Link, click on this and OvidSP Medline will open.

is Ovid's new search interface which offers new ways of searching Medline, including Basic Search which uses Natural Language Searching and ranks results according to the frequency with which search terms appear in the results. For novice users and those who only require a few articles on their topic, Basic Search offers an easy but limited search method. For researchers and students doing literature reviews, and research requiring comprehensive coverage of the scholarly literature, Advanced Search is the optimal way to search using Ovid's powerful mapping feature which automatically maps to the nearest MeSH headings in Medline.
Advanced Search will be used exclusively in this tutorial.

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