Course Literature search in medical databases (Language English)

ECTS: 0.3

Course leader: Annette Balle Sørensen

Language: English

Graduate school: Faculty of Health

Course fee: 360.00 DKK

Status: Course is finished

Semester: Spring 2023

Application deadline: 13/04/2023

Cancellation deadline: 27/04/2023

Course type: Classroom teaching

Start date: 11/05/2023

Administrator: Lena Melchior Villadsen

PhD students

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

The course A137/43 Literature search in medical databases is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2023.

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 Open Access, 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, Open Access, and Copyright will be briefly presented. Finally, reference management programs (EndNote) will be introduced.

Instructors: Janne Lytoft Simonsen og Annette Balle Sørensen

Venue:  Aarhus University, Aarhus.

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:

  • 11 May 2023 09:00 - 16:00