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How to Peer Review Search Strategies

How to Peer Review Search Strategies

1 - VS Shares
I recently did a short course on "How to Peer Review Search Strategies". This was offered by INSTATS - an organization that offers several excellent research related courses. What is Peer reviewing of search strategies? In India, we have a lacuna of knowledge about search strategies and the need for them to be structured. Most often very little thought is given to the strategy and it is done in an ad-hoc manner. Peer reviewing is something no one even thinks about.. The six hour session over two evenings - run by two expert Information Professionals - Carol Lefebvre - and…
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A little known PubMed search feature

A little known PubMed search feature

1 - VS Shares
At the end of 2022 PubMed launched the "Proximity operator" feature. At the end of 2023, it would not be surprising to find that no one in India (or only a few) is aware of this. Proximity operators - available in most databases that we have to pay for, make searching much more relevant, when we search for terms like "Under developed countries". When we search these with the tags [ti] or [tiab], we are searching for the term as a phrase. When we search them with a proximity operator, then we are searching for the terms being near each…
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Access alone is not enough. Train everybody

Access alone is not enough. Train everybody

1 - VS Shares
Dr GN is a faculty in a medical college. He is registered for QMedCourses and approached me with a request for help. He is studying for an additional degree in an institution in the UK and has to write a systematic review as part of the program. He said that the requirement was that he had to do it all by himself and could not get a team to work with him. While this is unusual as systematic reviews are ideally done by a team (to reduce bias), in this case the objective of solo working is to learn every…
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