Skip to main content
It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

Gerstein Science Information Centre

Searching the Literature: A Guide to Comprehensive Searching in the Health Sciences

Students and researchers in the health sciences are often required to conduct comprehensive searches of the literature. Follow the steps in this guide to learn how this process works.

Welcome!

Use this guide to learn how to properly and effectively conduct comprehensive searches of the literature. 

 

Remember that searching:

  • is an ITERATIVE process
  • often requires re-evaluation and testing, from adding or changing keywords and the ways they relate to each other, to choosing new resources to search, and even rewording or straight-up changing the research question!
  • is a logic puzzle that requires an understanding of precision and sensitivity
  • pretty fun once you get the hang of the process!

Advanced Literature Searching - Cheat Sheet
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=577919&p=3987197
guides.library.utoronto.ca
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-21
55460
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GIOROXSNMSYWHXZ45JOVIKBWBIP5H4ZL
<urn:uuid:a7da1a53-a510-426b-88c0-2f7d1f12cf39>
2021-05-14T17:06:50Z
35.183.221.217
text/html
sha1:C2OVIQVYZZN3WEZDHTNAHXQBQW23UR6U
<urn:uuid:59c84ba9-cf34-42bf-9a42-e91c8ac50b28>
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=577919&p=3987197
response
<urn:uuid:47785bd9-9e53-4945-85c0-7da8be0598c8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-126.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/