Systematic literature search in PubMed. A short introduction

In order to identify current (and relevant) evidence for aspecific clinical question within the unmanageable amount of information available, solid skills in performing asystematic literature search are essential. An efficient approach is to search abiomedical database containing relevant literature citations of study reports. In this article, we explain step by step how to perform asystematic literature search via PubMed (MEDLINE) by means of an example research question in the field of ophthalmology. First, we demonstrate how to translate the clinical problem into awell-framed and searchable research question, how to identify relevant search terms and how to conduct atext word search and asearch with keywords in MeSH terms. We then show how to limit the number of search results if the search yields too many irrelevant hits and how to increase the number in the case of too few citations. Finally, we summarize all essential principles that guide aliterature search via PubMed.