Tuesday, 12 September 2023
Tuesday, 25 August 2020
COVID-19 Search Bank
NHS Health Education England virtually gathered together a group of information specialists in April to create a "search bank" of work undertaken on COVID-19. The aim of this work was to enable sharing of information on the new coronavirus and streamline the time taken on literature searches.
For the most part, entire search strategies and results are available on the search bank. I was involved as a peer reviewer of the strategies, as well as a contributor. For my purposes, I wanted to be able to replicate chunks of searches for my requesters, as often I was being asked questions with a slightly different slant. With the amount of literature being published daily on COVID-19, I would be wary of sending on someone else's results wholesale (and certainly never without due credit!), so I mostly used the bank for borrowing search strings and re-running these in the biomedical databases. However, a couple of times I did send on other librarian's results where the question was so similar to mine, and used that as a springboard for my own update on the topic, which I added.
The search bank can be found here: https://kfh.libraryservices.nhs.uk/covid-19-coronavirus/for-lks-staff/literature-searches/
Working on this project gave me a real insight into the different ways we practise as Clinical Librarians and how we present our results to requesters. There's a broad range across HEE, as I'd always suspected, and I don't think there's a single way of doing things that should be adopted by all, we clearly do what works best for our service users and for our services.
There's definitely an argument over whether we as information specialists overemphasise the importance of the search strategy. I find it interesting that in some database outputs, the strategy/search history features at the beginning (e.g. OVID) and others place it at the end (HDAS). It's not the most important thing for the end user but I think it's essential for transparency and reproducibility and so I like to see it included in full, and so at the end of the results file is probably the right place for it to be for me. It's not often that the final line of the strategy is the only place I find the selected abstracts from, so it's not always a completely clear picture of the search, but it's a useful tool to see what the information specialist was up to. I often look at my colleague's searches to prompt ideas for searching, and I always check relevant Cochrane strategies!
Clinical Librarian bibliography updated
The Clinical Librarian bibliography has been updated here: http://www.uhl-library.nhs.uk/cl/pdfs/clinical_librarian_bibliography.pdf
If you're aware of any articles that we've not included, please let us know!
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Using the Data Miner Chrome extension to collate Google results
- You can download Data Miner here (big bonus was that I didn’t need permission from IT!).
- They also have a YouTube channel with lots of tutorials which can be accessed here.
COVID-19 resources
Using Global Index Medicus in systematic reviews
- Adjacency operators did not seem to work, or at least, ADJ and NEAR were not recognised by GIM.
- It is possible to select and download references within the search results
- The best way to view all results was by downloading the .csv file and using Excel to read (which is often what the systematic reviewers I work with want to see) – there was no limit of numbers and I was able to download 3000+ results in a single file
- Downloading .ris files for reference management software could only be done in batches of 100 (so quite a time consuming process)
- Keep a copy of your strategy safe so you can re-run it immediately prior to submission to your journal of choice
Thursday, 7 November 2019
Helping with Systematic Reviews
- Frailty Factors and Outcomes in Vascular Surgery Patients: ASystematic Review and Meta-analysis (Houghton et al., 2019)
- A systematic review investigating the identification,causes, and outcomes of delays in the management of chronic limb-threateningischemia and diabetic foot ulceration (Nickinson et al., 2019)
- Whilst daunting for a perfectionist at first, once you’ve done a few, they’re the best thing! It’s really satisfying creating a sensitive strategy that fits the question well.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment with different databases, and with different fields.
- Keep open communication with requestors, and manage expectations. I learnt from my colleagues about the benefits of scoping strategies, and now I use them every time. They really help gauge whether I’ve understood the question correctly, and pin down what the requestor wants, as well as giving them a good idea on result numbers.
- Run tests to check the key articles have been found. This was emphasised on the courses, but I have also found it reassures requestors, and helps you identify any terms that might have been missed.







