Information Resources for Clinical Research, 5 of 5

>> Tracy Shields: Hi, I'm Tracey Shields, a biomedical librarian at the NIH Library. In this section of Searching the Literature, we're going to go over other tools that you may use to help support your search. In this section, we're going to talk about some of the ideas for documenting your search process, but also some tools that could help support your information

needs as part of your research and how to keep up with new and emerging literature. Now, search documentation isn't a very exciting topic. That is for sure. But think of it as a way to be kind to your future self. Searching documentation can be done a lot of different ways. It can be very simple, it can be very complex.

It could be something as simple as a word document that you've copied and pasted your search strategies into it that ind of keep track of what you've been doing. But there are also tools such as the PubMed search history that you can export as an Excel spreadsheet that will help you document what you've been doing.

And the importance of documentation is that it allows you to remember what you did or perhaps what you didn't do, the number of results that you've got. And also, in case you need to revisit your search, you don't have to rebuild everything from scratch. Something I would strongly suggest to you is consider adding notes or comments

on your thought processes during your searching. And it could be something as justification for a decision you made of leaving in a term or leaving out a term because oftentimes you may not remember why you did a certain thing. Having that as part of your search documentation can be an invaluable tool, especially as you move forward in your research process