Introduction to literature searching for MPH and MIPH students

Online database tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial has been designed to help you familiarise yourself with Medline on OVID.

The Ovid search interface is user-friendly and helps everyone get results. But without some knowledge of the database structure and searching capabilities you will not be able to control the quality or quantity of the resulting citations.

This tutorial aims to give the user more control over searching. This is done by discussing basic search strategy techniques as well as search tools available in OVID Medline.

Note: Medline is the biggest medical database but there are other databases that may be provide extra citations such as Cinahl for Nursing, Embase for drug treatments, or various Australian medical and health databases. Ask your librarian which would be appropriate for your research topic. For a complete list of health and medical database use the following link