Course Systematic Literature Search (Research-year)

Title: Systematic Literature Search (Research Year)

Reg.no. A88/78

is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, fall 2020.

Criteria for participation: Research-year students.

Please notice the equivalent course for PhD students: A137 Literature search in medical databases.

Aim: To make the research year students familiar with the most important medical databases, and enable them to perform qualified searches for relevant scholarly literature. Participants will be introduced to systematic literature searching as well as citation searching and reference management.

Learning outcomes: To enable the participants to assess the relevance, strengths and weaknesses of different search methods. To enable the participants to build a search strategy and select relevant information sources and search terms. To make the participants familiar with the concept of reference management software in general and EndNote in particular.

Contents: Structure and content of relevant databases will be reviewed. For the systematic literature search, emphasis will be on PubMed and Embase, and the participants will learn to construct precise search strings by employing the tools (e.g. MeSH) of the databases. For the presentation of citation searching, Web of Science and Scopus will be used to illustrate the characteristics of this search technique. EndNote will be used to introduce the different features and uses of a reference management software. Furthermore, the course will touch on impact measures, the evaluation of a search results, critical appraisal of different article types and what to consider when conducting a literature search. The lessons will alternate between theory and hands-on exercises. It will be possible for participants to search for literature for their own project.

Place: Loftsalen (1266-316), The Victor Albeck Building, Vennelyst Blvd 4, 8000 Aarhus

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Research Year students and Research Honours Programme students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 23 March 2021 08:30 - 16:00