Evidence in the medical literature can be found by searching for journal articles in a range of indexing databases such as the Australian Medical Index, Embase, Medline, the PubMed service, or to the full text commentary journals such as ACP Journal Club and Bandolier. Techniques for filtering your search results to find sound, evidence-based articles are described below. Access all these products direct through the Library Web site. Search in the Catalogue or using Supersearch. Ask a Librarian if you need assistance in using any of these pathways.
ACP Journal Club
ACP Journal Club is a full text evidence based journal providing commentaries on high quality articles from a number of top journals which are deemed to be important to clinical practice. They are produced by staff at the American College of Physicians and the BMJ Publishing Group.
Australasian Medical Index (AMI)
AMI is a database which indexes 100+ Australian and New Zealand journals, mostly not covered by Medline. Do a full subject search on AMI and follow one of these steps: either limit your search to types of publication e.g. clinical trial, practice guideline, or combine with subject headings such as meta analysis, randomized controlled trials.
Bandolier
Bandolier is a full text evidence based journal providing information from reviews of trials. They are produced by staff at Oxford University (UK) - Pain Research, Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics and Medical School.
Embase
Embase is an indexing database covering the international biomedical literature, with an emphasis on European and Japanese titles, and strong in the area of drugs and pharmacology. Using the Ovid interface you can do a full subject search and then combine your search result with subject headings such as meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, review.
Medline
Medline is a major indexing database which covers over 4,500 international biomedical journals, and is produced by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.). Using the Ovid interface you can do a full subject search.
Limit your search to types of publication e.g. clinical trial, meta-analysis. Use the "Search fields" icon to choose to search or display the index of publication types covered in Medline. Alternatively use the two letter field tag as in the following example: clinical trial.pt.
PubMed
PubMed is a version of Medline provided free from the National Library of Medicine (U.S.). Pathways are provided for clinicians to automatically restrict their search to evidence-based articles.
Use the "Clinical queries" link on the left of the main search screen. Type in your subject search string and select the automatic filtering according to the type of question you have. Select the category from: diagnosis, etiology, prognosis or therapy, AND select the emphasis from: sensitivity or specificity. You can also choose limit your search to systematic reviews or meta-analysis studies by typing in your subject search string, and selecting the Systematic Reviews limit.
Expert search words are applied automatically to filter your search. The construction and format of these filters are explained fully at the PubMed site.
More information
- For more assistance, please Contact a Librarian in your subject library.
