Kelly Len, St Pierre-Hansen Natalie
Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Box 489, Sioux Lookout, ON.
Can Fam Physician. 2008 Nov;54(11):1572-3.
To describe the scope, content, and organization of commonly used medical databases and search strategies, using a search of the topic aboriginal to illustrate the various ways the topic is covered in each of the databases.
Comparison of literature searches.
Seven common medical databases were searched using all the MeSH terms that are permutations of aboriginal. A secondary analysis using the "remove duplicates" function in Ovid was done to identify articles specific to each database.
Number of articles found by each search.
Searching by MeSH terms often produces very different information from that found when searching by text word. A unique term, such as Ojibway, is best found with a text word search. A more general term, such as Aborigines, is best searched by subject using a MeSH term. Many databases can be searched through Ovid and might all use different MeSH terms for the same reference. PubMed default searches that use MeSH terms and text words simultaneously often produce very large numbers of articles. In searching for North American aboriginal using MeSH terms, MEDLINE and PubMed produced the most references, followed by Healthstar. Calculating distinct "all aboriginal" references in EMBASE, Healthstar, and PsycINFO indicated that MEDLINE produced nearly all the articles found in Healthstar. In fact, MEDLINE alone produced 88% of the articles found in MEDLINE and EMBASE and 79% of the articles found in MEDLINE and PsycINFO.
Although several researchers and medical librarians have noted that MEDLINE and EMBASE are quite distinct databases, suggesting both need to be searched for a complete search, we did not find that to be the case for the topic aboriginal. The results of this study demonstrate that using MEDLINE produces the most extensive coverage of literature on the topic aboriginal. To fully capture the complete body of available literature on other subjects might require searches of many databases, depending on the topic.
描述常用医学数据库的范围、内容和组织方式，并通过对“原住民”这一主题的检索来说明每个数据库涵盖该主题的不同方式。
文献检索比较。
使用“原住民”的所有排列组合的医学主题词（MeSH词）检索七个常见医学数据库。利用Ovid中的“去除重复项”功能进行二次分析，以确定每个数据库特有的文章。
每次检索找到的文章数量。
使用MeSH词检索通常会得到与使用文本词检索非常不同的信息。像“奥吉布瓦人”这样的独特术语，最好通过文本词检索来找到。像“原住民”这样更通用的术语，最好使用MeSH词按主题进行检索。许多数据库都可以通过Ovid进行检索，而且对于同一参考文献，它们可能都使用不同的MeSH词。PubMed同时使用MeSH词和文本词的默认检索通常会产生大量文章。在使用MeSH词检索北美原住民时, MEDLINE和PubMed产生的参考文献最多，其次是Healthstar。计算EMBASE、Healthstar和PsycINFO中不同的“所有原住民”参考文献表明，MEDLINE产生了几乎所有在Healthstar中找到的文章。实际上，仅MEDLINE就产生了在MEDLINE和EMBASE中找到的文章的88%，以及在MEDLINE和PsycINFO中找到的文章的79%。
尽管一些研究人员和医学图书馆员指出MEDLINE和EMBASE是截然不同的数据库，建议两者都需要检索以进行全面检索，但我们发现对于“原住民”这一主题并非如此。本研究结果表明，使用MEDLINE对“原住民”这一主题的文献覆盖最为广泛。要全面获取关于其他主题的所有可用文献，可能需要根据主题检索多个数据库。
