Bibliographic search strategies

Users of bibliography databases retrieve articles, books and documents that are scientifically relevant to the investigation project or health problem they are trying to solve. In this sense, before you search for any information, you should first develop a search strategy and think about the concepts that form the basic issues of your topic and about the keywords you will use. Precision, specificity, efficacy and accuracy are key in a search strategy. 

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) and Web of Science are important research platforms that collect scientific publication references from different knowledge areas. Free worldwide internet access to the National Library of Medicine’s Medline in early 1997 was followed by a 300-fold increase in searches (from 163,000 searches per month in 1997 to 51.5 million searches per month in 2004) being directly used by clinicians, students, and the general public.

It is important to take into consideration the differences between references and bibliography:
- References allude to articles cited; they only include the specific citations you have listed in your article.
- Bibliography is the articles, books or reviews consulted. The whole material you have read to prepare your article.

What’s a Boolean?
Boolean logic takes its name from the British mathematician George Boole (1815-1864). The principle of Boolean logic lets you organize concepts together in sets. When searching databases, keywords are controlled by the use of operators OR, AND, and NOT, linking words or phrases for more precise searches.
AND: Narrows a search because all terms must be present in each hit.
OR: Widens a search because each hit will contain either term.
NOT: Narrows a search by excluding records containing specified words.

Find below a brief tutorial for using NCBI databases.
 

1. Steps in a bibliographic search strategy:

• Formulate the appropriate question
•  Select the suitable database to answer the question
•  Guarantee the efficacy and accuracy.

2. Efficacy: skill to find all the relevant items in a database. Accuracy: skill to find the main relevant documents.

3. To know the content of specific databases in order to search the adequate information:

• PubMed: scientific papers.
• OMIM: compendium of human genes and genetic phenotypes. 
• Gene: nomenclature, reference sequences, maps, pathways, symbols, variations about genes.
• KEGG Pathways: pathway maps representing the molecular interaction and reaction networks
• Gene Ontology: description of genes in relation to biological process, cellular component and molecular function.
• Google Scholar: scientific papers. 
•  Web of Science: scientific papers - impact factor. 
•  Biocompare: products and new technology.
• TESEO: PhD.
•  Clinical Trials: identification and information about clinical trials.

1. Which journal has the highest impact factor in 2013?
2. How many papers has Calle EE published in 2004?
3. What is the actual address of Spiegelman BM?
4. Which experimental techniques have been used in Figure 1 of the article: Gómez-Ambrosi J et al. Clin Endocrinol 2008; 69:208-215?
5. How many papers have Hoeks J and Schrauwen P published together?






1. CA-A Cancer Journal for Clinicians (IF: 162.500)
2. 15 papers
3. Department of Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
4. ELISA and Western blot
5. 35 papers