Course Literature search in medical databases (Language English)

The course A137/41 Literature search in medical databases (PhD), is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, fall 2022.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Please notice the equivalent course for research year medical students: A88 (Research-year) Systematic Literature Search.

Recommended knowledge for participation: Master’s degree

Aim: To make the participants familiar with the most important medical databases, and enable them to perform qualified searches for relevant scholarly literature.  Furthermore, to make the participants aware of basic principles of research evaluation and different aspects related to research publication.  

Learning outcomes:

• To enable the participants to perform qualified searches, systematic as well as citation searches, in relevant medical databases.
• To introduce the participants to methods of scientific quality measurements, thus enabling them to understand the basic principles of research evaluation.
• To present a brief overview of different aspects related to research publication such as ORCID, Forskerportalen.dk, Copyright etc.
• To introduce the basic concept of reference management programs in general and – if requested – to make the participants familiar with the specific reference management program EndNote.

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 7 hours.

Content: Structure and content of the databases will be reviewed. With respect to literature searching, emphasis will be on PubMed, and the participants will learn to construct precise search strings by employing the tools (e.g. MeSH) of the databases. The focal point of the introduction to Web of Science and Scopus will be cited reference searches. In continuation of this, issues of “What is scientific quality, and can it be measured?” (‘impact factor’, H-index, research registration, etc.) will be discussed. Furthermore, topics such as ORCID and Copyright will be briefly presented. Finally, reference management programs (EndNote) will be introduced.

The lessons will alternate between theory and exercises at the computer. 

Venue: Victor Albeck bygningen, Vennelyst Boulevard 4, Aarhus C

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students and Health 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:

• 04 October 2022 09:00 - 16:00