by Andrea Dinkelman, Pharm.D., M.L.S. and Cindy Schmidt, M.D., M.L.S.
Updated July 2019
WARNING:
Do not use Internet Explorer to work on this tutorial. Instead, use Firefox or another browser.
Instructions:
Use the Arrow icons below the instruction screen to go forwards and backwards in the tutorial.
Do not work ahead of the instructions on the screen. As soon as you finish reading and responding to the instructions on a tutorial screen, hit the forward-facing arrow. Nearly every step in the search process is explained.
If you want to skip between distant parts of the tutorial, you can use the "Menu/Contents" button above the instruction screen to show the tutorial's "Table of Contents" and can click on the needed section of the tutorial.
If the "contents" menu jitters, right-click on the instruction panel header and select the "reload"/"refresh" option. The menu should then function correctly.
Clicking the "Single-page view" link will produce a transcript of the entire tutorial.
The purpose of this tutorial is to help the student master comprehensive, keyword searching.
Performing a truly comprehensive, keyword search is more difficult than performing a similarly thorough, subject heading search. We hope that this tutorial will make the steps involved in this complex process easier to understand and master.
Upon completion of this tutorial you will be able to:
Your hospital pharmacy director wants to initiate a proton-pump-inhibitor exchange program. He asks, "Which of the proton pump inhibitors can be administered through a nasogastric (NG) tube?" Your director specifies that he is not interested in any of the multi-drug, proton-pump-inhibitor preparations.
What are the major concepts in this question?
The first major concept in this question is the specific category of drugs called "proton pump inhibitors."
The second major concept in the question is "nasogastric (NG) administration."
If you were going to complete an exhaustive search concerning the class of drugs "proton pump inhibitors," you would need to include all of the following terms:
In practice the number of trade names is sometimes so enormous that the available search engines cannot handle a search that includes all of the brand/trade names. In that case, one must consider searching without trade names or only including the most important trade names.
For the purpose of this first, tutorial search, you will just complete a routine, relatively thorough (but not exhaustive) search and will include the types of terms listed above in bold-face. Your pharmacy is located in the U.S., so you only need to investigate drugs that are approved in the U.S.
AHFS Drug Information (available at UNMC via LexiComp) can provide all of the bold-face terms for FDA-approved drugs and is organized by drug class. Click here to open LexiComp in the adjacent screen.
Unfortunately, searching for a drug class in LexiComp will not result in retrieval of the relevant information in AHFS Drug Information. Instead you have to know how to access the Indexes in LexiComp.
The list of pharmacology/therapeutic categories will appear.
It's easiest to compose a keyword search in a Word document.
1. Copy the name of the therapeutic category and paste it into your Word document.
2. Do you know of other names for this class of drugs, other spellings for the class name, or abbreviations for the class name? If so, add these to your Word document.
For instance, some authors hyphenate "proton-pump inhibitors"; others leave out the hyphen "proton pump inhibitors". These drugs are often called PPIs.
3. Copy the listed generic names for the PPIs available in the U.S. and paste them into your Word document.
4. Gather the U.S. brand names for each drug.
To find the U.S. brand name for the first drug:
a. place your cursor over the generic name,
b. slide over to the "Jump to field" menu that appears
c. click on the "Preparations" link.
You are only looking for single-drug preparations. The "preparations" tables will have a "_____ Combinations" heading if multiple drug preparations are listed in the table.
d. Copy the brand name/s that appear for any single agent preparations and paste them into your Word document. Do not include the trademark symbol.
Remember the pharmacy director is not interested in multi-ingredient preparations. Do not copy the brand names of any "___ Combinations."
5. Use your browser's back button to return to the list of generic names. Repeat steps 4 a-d for the next drug. Continue until you've found all the U.S. brand names for single-agent preparations of all the PPIs.
Now that you have your list of needed class and drug names, look over the list. Have you included any unneeded words? If so, cross them out.
For instance, have you included words like drug, drugs, medication, medications, agent, agents etc. in the class names?
If so, remove these 'drug'-like term/s. Authors do not always include such words when they refer to a drug class and including all the synonyms for the 'drug'-like term/s (drug, drugs, medication, medications, agent, agents, therapy, therapies, etc) is a challenge best avoided.
Also remove words for specific types of preparations (e.g. tablet, capsule, Solutab, I.V., IV, over-the-counter, OTC, 24 hr, extended-release).
Did you remember to include all of these terms in your list?
proton pump inhibitor
proton-pump inhibitor
proton pump inhibitors
proton-pump inhibitors
PPI
PPIs
dexlansoprazole
Dexilant
esomeprazole
Nexium
lansoprazole
Prevacid
omeprazole
Prilosec
Zegerid
pantoprazole
Protonix
rabeprazole
Aciphex
Have you included the trade names --
Vimovo, Prevpac?
These are drug combination preparations. Don't include them in your search.
Use the concept 1 search terms you've listed, asterisks, quotation marks, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and parentheses to create a search statement.
Want help? Click the relevant link below:
The search statement for your PPI concept should be similar to the statement below:
("proton pump inhibitor" OR "proton pump inhibitors" OR "proton-pump inhibitor" OR "proton-pump inhibitors" OR PPI* OR dexlansoprazole OR Dexilant OR esomeprazole OR Nexium OR lansoprazole OR Prevacid OR omeprazole OR Prilosec OR Zegerid OR pantoprazole OR Protonix OR rabeprazole OR Aciphex)
If necessary, correct your statement so that it includes all the other search terms shown above. The order of the terms is not important.
In your word document, type every term or phrase that an author might use to designate "nasogastric administration." Click here for help.
At a minimum, your term list should include the terms listed below:
NG tube NG tubes NG administration nasogastric
If you included "ng" in your list of terms, please click here and read the information provided.
Insert appropriate Boolean operators to join the NG terms and phrases. For help, click here.
Warning: "NG tube*" will not work as expected in PubMed. In PubMed, you can only truncate single words like PPI*. In PubMed, to get the results you want when searching for multi-word phrases, you will have to include all of the desired phrases:
"NG tube" OR "NG tubes"
You should now have the alternate terms for the PPI concept joined by OR's and enclosed in parentheses. The alternate terms for the nasogastric concept should, similarly, be joined by OR's and enclosed in parentheses.
( "proton pump inhibitor" OR "proton pump inhibitors" OR "proton-pump inhibitor" OR "proton-pump inhibitors" OR PPI* OR dexlansoprazole OR Dexilant OR esomeprazole OR Nexium OR lansoprazole OR Prevacid OR omeprazole OR Prilosec OR Zegerid OR pantoprazole OR Protonix OR rabeprazole OR Aciphex)
("NG tube" OR "NG tubes" OR "NG administration" OR nasogastric )
You have one more decision to make. Should you choose AND, OR or NOT to link the two search concepts? Use the appropriate Boolean operator to join the two concepts.
Did you use AND to link the two concepts?
If so you're correct! Your search should now look something like:
( "proton pump inhibitor" OR "proton pump inhibitors" OR "proton-pump inhibitor" OR "proton-pump inhibitors" OR PPI* OR dexlansoprazole OR Dexilant OR esomeprazole OR Nexium OR lansoprazole OR Prevacid OR omeprazole OR Prilosec OR Zegerid OR pantoprazole OR Protonix OR rabeprazole OR Aciphex) AND ("NG tube" OR "NG tubes" OR "NG administration" OR nasogastric )
Add --
[all]
to the end of your search statement. This step will produce a search statement that looks something like:
( "proton pump inhibitor" OR "proton pump inhibitors" OR "proton-pump inhibitor" OR "proton-pump inhibitors" OR PPI* OR dexlansoprazole OR Dexilant OR esomeprazole OR Nexium OR lansoprazole OR Prevacid OR omeprazole OR Prilosec OR Zegerid OR pantoprazole OR Protonix OR rabeprazole OR Aciphex) AND ("NG tube" OR "NG tubes" OR "NG administration" OR nasogastric )[all]
This step is specific to PubMed. The [all] keeps PubMed from autocorrecting your search. If you don't add an [all] to the end of your search, PubMed may change infrequently used words to similarly spelled, irrelevant words. The [all] is most important when one is working on searches containing investigational and foreign drug names, searches like your "final search assignment" search.
It's time to test your search in PubMed:
2. Use the "Sort by" menu to select "Publication Date."
1. Did your search retrieve 130 or more records?
In July 2019, this search retrieved 136 records. Your search should retrieve this many, or more, records. If you are not retrieving this many records or are retrieving far more records, please ask for help.
2. Look at the highlighted terms in in the first 5-10 records. Does each of these records appear to contain at least one of your "PPI" terms and at least one of your "NG administration" terms?
If not, please check to be sure you haven't missed a parenthesis or joined your NG and PPI concepts using an OR (the two concepts should be joined with an AND). If these checks don't diagnose your search problem, please ask for help.
3. Look at the relationship between the nasogastric administration term/s and the PPI term/s in the first 20 records. How many talk about nasogastric administration of PPI's (rather than other uses of a nasogastric tube)?
When this tutorial was updated in July 2019, there were four highly relevant records among the first 20 results . In other words, 8/10 of the results were not focused on the topic of interest. A thorough, well-crafted, comprehensive keyword search will usually retrieve a lot of results that are not focused on the topic of interest.
Click on the "Advanced" link under the PubMed search box.
After reaching the "Advanced Search" page, place your cursor to the left of the word "History," click and then drag to highlight the entire row containing your search statement (as shown in the figure below).
Copy the selected information. Any of the three methods listed below should work to copy:
Paste it into a Word document. Any of the three methods listed below should work to paste:
Save the changes to the document.
Submit the Word document through Canvas
We're not spending a lot of time on drug class searches during lecture, but you should know the following for the test:
1. What is one resource that includes lists of all the names of FDA-approved members of various drug classes? AHFS Drug Information
2. What names should you include in an exhaustive search for literature about a drug class?
3. Do not include words like drug, drugs, medication, medications, agent, agents, tablets, I.V., extended-release, or 24 hr. etc. in the class names when constructing a keyword search.
If you had needed to do an exhaustive search on the "nasogastric administration of PPIs" search, you would need to use Martindale's or another source to find foreign generic names, investigational names, CAS registry numbers, and foreign trade names for each of the drugs in the PPI class. You would also need to think about other ways that authors might refer to the "proton pump inhibitors"/PPIs as a class. We neither had the time for that level of searching on the first tutorial search nor was that level of searching necessary. Librarians, pharmacy students, and pharmacists, frequently perform relatively quick searches using English generic names OR'd with class names, and sometimes U.S. brand names. There are many situations in which these less thorough searches are appropriate - like this first tutorial search.
When you work on the second tutorial search, your "final search assignment" search, you will be working on an exhaustive search, a search that could be used to support a systematic review of the literature. Get ready to include all the terms needed in an exhaustive search.
Click here to open the second tutorial search. You will need to click the "Start tutorial" button that appears.
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