1. Literature Searching for Qualitative Research Unit 3

5. Challenges for Searching

7. Advanced Methods for Identifying Qualitative Research: Methodological Filters

16. Over the next few slides, I’ll go through a search step by step in the Medline database, which I’ve accessed via the NHS Evidence website. Here I’ve searched for a subject heading related to ‘breast cancer’ and then clicked on the blue ‘search’ button

17. Here I’ve chosen the subject heading ‘breast neoplasms’ by clicking on the ‘select’ box to the left and clicking the blue ‘search’ button

18. Here I’ve got my search results and have scrolled down to the ‘limits’ section at the bottom of the screen. Then I click on ‘Clinical Query Limits’

19. Here I’ve chosen the ‘Qualitative Studies (optimized)’ option and applied it to my search (see the number 1 in the main search box to indicate that I want to apply the clinical query to search number one) and then clicked on the blue ‘search’ button

20. Here I’ve got my results- still too many at 10,000+!

21. Here I’m searching for papers that mention the word stem ‘husband’ in the title or abstract, then I click on the blue ‘search’ button

22. Here I’ve clicked on the box to the left of my last two searches and then clicked on the blue ‘combine selected searches’ button

23. At last! We are now down to just 38 papers! I then click on the ‘38’ to view them…

24. … and they look pretty good!