Learn how to conduct a literature search to find the information you need for your studies, research, work and patient care. Take a look at our etutorials and blog posts to learn about the steps you need to complete to search effectively and efficiently.
What is Literature Searching?
Literature searching is the process you follow to systematically find evidence to answer a question. This may be for your assignments, dissertation, research, work-based problem or patient care. You follow a series of steps to take you through the process to ensure you gather all the evidence you need.
Complete our etutorials and read our blog posts to develop your skills and maximise the effectiveness of your literature searching.
Creating your plan
It is a good idea to create a plan for your literature search. This will ensure you focus your search and complete all steps. It also gives you a record of what you have done so that you can repeat or refine the search at a later date.
- Complete our etutorial Introduction to Literature Searching to learn about the process
- Download and complete our literature plan
What is your question?
Learn how to analyse your question and break it down into different elements. This helps you to focus on the information you need to find to answer your question. Complete our etutorials:
- Identify your question
- Using PICO to create clinical questions
- More analysis tools for healthcare-related questions
Develop key search skills for databases
Key search skills are essential for effective database searching. Our e-tutorials guide you through the fundamental skills you need to develop. Please complete these tutorials:
- Identify your search terms by learning how to use keywords, phrases, wildcards and truncation
- Learn how using a thesaurus can help you to find articles via databases
- Combining searches with boolean operators will help you to search more efficiently
- Applying filters to focus results will save you time
Which resources do you need?
Make sure you select the right resource to get the right information and save time. Our etutorial Select the right resource explains more about the different types of resources. Check our help pages for more support using particular resources.
How will you evaluate the results you find?
You need to ensure that the articles and papers that you find are suitable to answer your question. Are they valid, report logical results and relevant to your question? Complete our tutorials to learn more:
How should you use information ethically?
Do you recognise the contributors to your work? Learn why referencing is so important and how you can avoid plagiarism; complete our tutorial Introduction to referencing and plagiarism.
How will you communicate the information you find?
Sharing what you find is an important element of the search process. We have a couple of etutorials to help you to develop different types of content:
- Writing an academic paper Get hints and tips on how to write an academic paper; useful for writing assignments too
- How to create an academic poster Hints and tips on what to consider and how to create your academic poster
- 10 steps to creating patient information Hints and tips to get you started developing your own patient information
How can you stay up-to-date?
Healthcare students and professionals must stay informed about the latest developments in the sector. Essential information includes updates on medical research, healthcare policies, and industry trends. What tools will help you to stay up-to-date? Our etutorials will show you:
- What is current awareness? And why do you need it
- Current awareness tools Learn more about the tools you can use to stay up-to-date
More help
Here's a quick overview of the key steps to make sure you maximise your literature searching:
Find links to all our etutorials on the Health Library website.
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