The Lung Cancer PubMed Searches offer:
- A quick entry point into the literature for those with limited time or searching skills
- A simple mechanism for finding high quality, reputable information within a large and sophisticated biomedical database
- Search reliability and consistency by eliminating the need for individuals to remember and replicate complex search strategies.
These searches:
- Are built upon experimentally developed and validated lung cancer search filters with proven high rates of recall (sensitivity) within the Medline database
- Are automated searches saved as hyperlinks for instantaneous, one-click searching of PubMed
- Cover a wide range of lung cancer topics under the broader categories Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer PubMed Searches and Lung Cancer and Palliative Care PubMed Searches
- Are continuously updated, retrieving new citations as they are added to the PubMed database
- Are available in multiple versions, eg, ‘English language’ or ‘free full text’ only
- Were developed by a medical librarian using the best available research evidence about effective searching.
What are their limitations?
- Searches are not designed to be exhaustive; they typically use only a handful of MeSH terms / textwords to represent topics
- Choosing free full text searches will reduce the number of results
- PubMed does not index all of the world's literature
- Some searches may retrieve few results. This will change in time as publications emerge.
Why limit a search to 'free full text' only?
This option limits retrieval to citations with an electronic link to a freely available full text version of the corresponding journal article. The benefit is immediate and timely access to an article which might otherwise only be available through a formal library service. This option is also restrictive as other potentially useful citations will not appear in the results list. A clinical decision based only on freely available full text articles may be biased in favour of the findings in those articles. These findings may not be representative of the broader published evidence base.
Why limit a search to 'highest level evidence'?
These searches limit retrieval to systematic reviews or randomised controlled trials. These research designs are considered by Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council to be two of the highest levels of evidence to answer key research questions, i.e. they are most likely to provide valid conclusions.
Finding out more
Search filters
This page was created 04 November 2011