Respond to a classmate. Do you see yourself applying this knowledge within your clinical setting? What committees or initiatives could you join that would greatly value solid research skills? (150 words)
Classmate’s Post:
When I perform academic research, I have found different tricks that improve my search results. Using Boolean operators like “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” has helped me refine searches to get better and more relevant articles that I want. For instance, combining terms such as “chronic pain AND physical therapy” helped narrow down my result to studies that discuss both concepts together. Using “OR” widened the search to include terms that are related to what I wanted (e.g., “NSAIDs OR nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs”), and “NOT” helped exclude information that is not relevant or useful (e.g., “chronic pain NOT cancer”). Quotation marks (“”) around specific phrases also help to make sure that search engines retrieved matches, which was useful for long phrases or specific terms. (Kalyani, 2020).
Some sources were better than others. For example, databases like PubMed and CINAHL offered citation links in different formats and gave relevant search results, making it easy to cite articles correctly. (NCBI, 2023). Google Scholar was helpful and better for finding a wide range of articles, but I often encountered some restrictions in that I had only limited access to the full-text versions.
The Frustrations I went through during my research/search included finding duplicate results across various sources and having found a lot of restricted articles. However, using CFK’s access or requesting articles through libraries often helped me find articles. I plan to apply these search strategies to other tasks, such as searching for credible sources when writing reports or even finding reliable information for personal projects.
References
Kalyani, V. (2020). Boolean Searching: A useful tool for enhancing search results. Journal of Library & Information Science, 45(2), 120-127.
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Boolean searching: Techniques for finding information. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/Boolean.htmlLinks to an external site.
NCBI. (2023). Using MeSH terms for more effective PubMed searches. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Links to an external site.