What's a search filter?
Running a search filter
Examples of search filters
What's a search filter?
A search filter helps you select a subset of investigation types from
the database. Usually, we are only interested in one aspect of a
disease or problem. For example, when searching on the diagnosis
of myocardial infarction you don't want want to retrieve citations
on the therapy of myocardial infarction. The filter helps eliminate unnecessary
citations from your search. This is accomplished by restricting the
search to studies utilizing a specified methodology, or to those indexed
by particular keywords which describe the type of investigation. .
The filter itself is a combination of search terms which must be relatively
sensitivity and specificity for selecting relevant articles. If the filter
is not sensitive you will miss important articles, if not specific, you
will get a lot of junk.
Search filters are not "written in stone." We have
made suggestions for simple filters in the main curriculum lectures.
You can (and should) add or remove terms from the filter to make your search
more sensitive, usually at the cost of decreased specificity (and vice
versa). Additional filters and terms from various sources are listed
below.
An excellent series of articles on searching and search filters is available
through ACP Journal Club.
Running a search filter
There are several options for using a search filter
-
Type in the search filter. This gets cumbersome.
-
Using OVID you can save a search strategy. The first time you use
each filter save it for future use.
-
Copy the examples provided in EMAC and Paste them into the OVID search
screen.
-
From the PubMed "Clinical Queries" search function you can automatically
filter your search.
|
