The other day I got an email from a doctor who is doing some important research on a topic. The doctor wondered why s/he got different results while combining two terms with AND and OR (Term 1 AND Term 2) versus (Term 1 OR Term 2) I have also had researchers emailing me asking - I am getting unmanageable results - could you check my strategy please? And I discover completely wrong usage of Boolean operators and Truncations More queries - typically from PG students / Guides "Should I search my topic on Google and PubMed?" "In PubMed is it…

“Search using keywords”. This is what most guides / teachers tell students when they want them to do a literature search. Keywords are usually the important words from one’s research question, that one uses to perform a search. For a research topic like: - “Long-term risk of pneumothorax in asthmatic patients”, the keywords used to search for literature would be - pneumothorax and asthma. In databases like PubMed, one could search these as thesaurus terms (Mesh terms) to get the most relevant results. The search strategy would be : Asthma[mesh] AND pneumothorax[mesh] But, when one is doing an exhaustive search…

Recently I had a chat with a faculty from a reputed medical college. At some point he said "We do not have a qualified librarian for our library". I almost said "What"? But as I am training myself to respond and not react, I just said "Oh, okay". After our call, I thought about this. And I remembered reading an advertisement of another reputed medical college - which advertised for several posts including that of a librarian. And it mentioned that a library science qualification was not mandatory. I remember being shocked then. To me it was like asking for…