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Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

Searching tips:

The CDSR database does not consistently use a system of subject headings or indexing terms. Without such a system, there is also no “mapping” of your keyword choices to help pick up variations in vocabulary or terminology. You will need to use synonyms and wildcards to capture these variations. Combine your synonymous terms using the Boolean operator “OR.”

Search terms that you enter can be anywhere within the complete text of the often lengthy Cochrane reviews. Think about searching your terms in the title field if you get too many irrelevant results.

You can limit your search in 4 different ways:

	Systematic reviews (full review documents with conclusions)
	Protocols (reviews in process; includes background and objectives)
	New reviews (database additions since the last quarterly update)
	Recently updated reviews (content has been changed significantly)

Search Scenario

Enter the word neuralgia in the main search box. Since this is a full-text database, the system will try to find your term in multiple places [mp]
Now enter the term herpe$ in the search box. The dollar sign is a truncation symbol. A truncated search term will pick up variations in spelling and word endings, such as herpes and herpetic. This kind of approach is recommended when you are using a database that does not have consistent keyword indexing. For instance, we would find articles that use the phrase, “the neuralgia resulting from a case of herpes, ” along with those article that use the term post-herpetic neuralgia.

Combine your key terms from the first two search statements as shown below. Before you click “Perform Search,” select the limit to Systematic Reviews by putting a check in that box. That way, you will not retrieve works-in-progress (protocols)
Click on the blue box labeled “Display” next to search statement four, which contains the links to our search results, three Cochrane systematic reviews on our topic

This is the results page with a summary display of the reviews retrieved in our search. If you want to view or capture the full document, click on “Topic Review.” However, none of our results for this search are directly relevant to our sample clinical question. We will look for additional evidence in other resources

Additional Searching Tip: if you click on the “Browse Topics” icon on the main toolbar, you will see tables of contents for the work of the 50 Cochrane review groups. For a listing of these groups, see this page from the Cochrane Collaboration web site.

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Searching the Medical Literature for the Best Evidence