Library Resources for DrPH Dissertation

Bibliographic databases are one of the best places to find current, peer-reviewed research on your topic. There are several databases of interest listed on our library's Public Health Resources page, and more still in our A to Z Databases list, but here are some of the most common databases you may want to search for public health information:

Databases don't understand natural language, context, or categories; they can only look for the keyworks you entered. So keep your searches simple and specific, and use keywords instead of phrases.

Let's look at an example search for this topic: Exploring barriers and facilitators to accessing community based mental health services among adolescents at risk for depression in Atlanta, GA.

Entering a natural-language phrase like barriers and facilitators to community-based mental health services for adolescents will not yield good search results for a couple of reasons. First, PubMed will look for articles that include every single word you've entered in the search bar. Second, PubMed will look for variations of the words you entered, which can be helpful (like additionally looking for "adolescence" and "adolescent") or less than helpful (such as looking for "facilitation" and "facilitative").

PubMed also doesn't know that you want to find everything that falls into the category of "mental health services," which could be therapy, medication management, crisis interventions, peer support services, and much more. PubMed will only look for the phrase "mental health services" if that's what you enter into the search box.

This particular search above finds 57 results, which is not zero, but it's still not a lot. There are millions of articles in PubMed, so it seems likely that there are more articles that are relevant that can be found, if we adjust our search a little bit.

Let's explore a better way to search for this topic that yields more relevant results.

There are a number of tools you can use to make searching easier; here are three tools you can use for any literature search.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators like AND and OR tell the database how to search for your keywords. Use AND when you want to find all of the words you've entered. Use OR when you want to find any of the words you've entered. You can use both AND and OR in the same search query, as we'll see below.

Truncation

Truncation is a shortcut to use so that you don't have to type in every possible variation of a word, like adolescent, adolescents, and adolescence. By using an asterisk, called a wildcard symbol, at the end of a word, the database will look for all words that begin with your root word.

adolescen* will find the words "adolescent," "adolescents," and "adolescence"

prevent* will find the words "prevent," "prevents," "prevention," and "preventative," among others.

Be careful with these! Sometimes you will find words you didn't intend to, and that will throw off your search results.

Quotation Marks

Put quotation marks around a phrase of two or more words to search for that exact phrase.

triple negative breast cancer will look for the words triple, negative, breast, and cancer anywhere in the title or abstract

"triple negative breast cancer" will look for this exact phrase anywhere in the title or abstract

Use quotation marks sparingly, because there are many ways that all of the authors out there could describe certain concepts. It's best to keep exact phrases to two or three words, instead of long sentences.

One way to build a good search is to break your research question down into its component parts, brainstorm keywords for each concept, and then use Boolean operators to combine the keywords and concepts to create a search query.

Here is what a list of keywords might look like for the topic of barriers and facilitators to accessing community-based mental health services for adolescents. You'll notice that there is no column for location; searching for a very specific location like Atlanta, Georgia might yield little to no results, but you can add a column for keywords that describe locations such as urban, rural, suburban, metropolitan, etc., to find similar studies done for similar populations.

For the above search, we put similar keywords and synonyms in each column. Link words that come from the same column with the Boolean operator OR to look for any of those keywords. You don't have to use all of the words from each column; play around with what works. If you are looking for a phrase of two or more words, put that phrase in quotation marks. Try using truncation to search for variations of keywords.

Put all the words you want to use from one column in a set of parentheses, like this:

(barrier* OR facilitator* OR obstacle*)

(adolescen* OR teen OR teenager)

("mental health services" OR counseling OR therapy)

Link the set of parentheses made from each column with the Boolean operator AND, to look for any of the words from the first set of keywords AND any of the words from the second set of keywords.

(barrier* OR facilitator* OR obstacle*) AND ("mental health services" OR counseling OR therapy)

Depending on how complicated your topic is, you may have a very long query:

(barrier* OR facilitator* OR obstacle*) AND (community-based OR "community based") AND ("mental health service*" or "mental health assessment*" or counseling or therapy) AND (adolescen* OR teen OR teenager)

The above search query finds 942 results in PubMed, which means there are probably more than the 57 articles we originally found with the first search that are relevant to this topic.

A keyword search using Boolean operators, truncation, and quotation marks can be used in any database, like PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, and more.

Sometimes using keywords alone does not yield the results you're looking for. You can add MeSH terms to your search to find more articles when you are searching in PubMed. MeSH terms (Medical Subject Headings) are indexing terms, or standardized keywords, which are attached to many articles in PubMed. Using MeSH terms can help you find additional articles where the authors described a concept differently than you did in your keywords. Remember how keywords like "mental health services" might not capture all of the ways in which mental health services might be described? MeSH terms can help capture those articles.

MeSH terms will only work in PubMed--you'll have to remove them if you want to run your search in a different database.

To find the most relevant MeSH terms for your topics, navigate to the PubMed homepage and click on "MeSH Database" underneath "Explore," which is under the search bar.

Search the MeSH database for some of your keywords. There aren't always matching MeSH terms for your keywords, such as in the case of "barriers and facilitators":

But sometimes, you'll have some options to choose from:

Click on the MeSH term to view a short description. If this MeSH term seems like it's relevant to your search, click "Add to Search Builder."

Copy the text that appears in the Search Builder box, and add it to your list of keywords.

Then, you can add your MeSH Terms to your search query. Because the MeSH term for Community Mental Health Services combines two of the concepts we're already searching, we can add more sets of parentheses to section those off from the rest of the query.

(barrier* OR facilitator* OR obstacle*) AND ("Community Mental Health Services"[Mesh] OR ((community-based OR "community based") AND ("mental health service*" or "mental health assessment*" or counseling or therapy))) AND (adolescen* OR teen OR teenager OR "Adolescent"[Mesh])

Then, you can paste this into the search bar of PubMed.