Accessing the literature: using bibliographic databases to find journal articles. Part 1.

Research in primary dental care, recertification, continuing professional development, lifelong learning, peer review and quality healthcare are all informed by the published literature. Dental practitioners can find out about reliable and up-to-date information available in the published literature by searching bibliographic databases. Published in two parts, this article describes the databases relevant to clinical dental practice and explains the generic skills required to search them effectively, focusing on MEDLINE, the database most relevant for the majority of dental practitioners, which is freely available via the World Wide Web (WWW). The article differentiates between sensitivity (maximum recall) and specificity (relevance of recall), and suggests how to identify a manageable number of relevant citations, how to save the citations, and how to obtain the full text. In part 2, the article concludes by alerting readers to some of the limitations and pitfalls of database-searching.