QMed recently started training and helping health professionals who have volunteered their time for research projects for the Lancet Citizens' Commission. This research project is being coordinated from CMC Vellore. They have subscribed to QMedCourses. The group is divided into small teams working on various research projects concerning healthcare in India - specially on achieving universal healthcare coverage for people in India in the coming years. The whole group has been signed up for QMedCourses and we are also working with each team, helping them with their search strategies - for them to search various databases, find all available literature…

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…