McGill University is located in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka traditional territory.
Take a look at the Health Sciences Research Basics guide to learn how to define your research question, create an effective search and manage your citations.
PubMed is a free bibliographic database that comprises more that 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. It is produced and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (the world's largest medical library).
Access PubMed via the McGill Library in order for the McGill Find Full Text buttons to appear. More information on access resources off campus is available here.
Medical Subject Headings (or MeSH) is a controlled vocabulary used to index articles in PubMed. Using MeSH to develop your search means you do not need to worry about synonyms and spelling variations and will increase the relevancy of your results.
Below is a short video (~4mins) demonstrating how to do a search in PubMed using MeSH.
National Library of Medicine, (2023, December 23).
It's important to compliment your MeSH search with keywords for the following reasons:
When brainstorming keywords, it's important to consider variant spellings, synonyms, and plural forms.
Below is a short video (~7mins) showing you how to search PubMed using keywords.
National Library of Medicine. (2020, July 27). PubMed: Using the advanced search builder [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/IHhTDqiNQK8.
Citation searching is a good way to track progression in research. It involves looking backward in time, at the articles that came before your focus article, as well as looking forward in time at what has been published since your focus article was published.
Backward Citation Searching gives you insight into the resources that informed the author(s) of your focus article.
Forward Citation Searching allows you to see
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