Web Site: OTA: Specialized Searching

Another Approach

Another approach to finding articles is to leave the "big box" search behind. You may want to do this when:

The number of search results is simply overwhelming or full of irrelevant hits.
You need a specialized filters for health professions searching.
- Limit to systematic reviews, clinical queries, evidence based articles, etc.
You are having trouble narrowing your results to occupational therapy or even health and medicine related items.

American Journal of Occupational Therapy is indexed and FULL TEXT in CINAHL.

OT Practice is Indexed Only in CINAHL

Science Direct This link opens in a new window
Core scientific literature, including titles such as THE LANCET, Cell, and Tetrahedron. Contains more than 2,500 journals, and more than nine million full-text articles.
Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window
Well respected systematic reviews. Good source for evidence based queries. SEARCH TIP: Use quotation marks around "occupational therapy" to search.
Health Source Nursing/Academic This link opens in a new window
This database provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. It also features the Lexi-PAL Drug Guide, which covers 1,300 generic drug patient education sheets with more than 4,700 brand names.
Health Source Consumer This link opens in a new window
Access to nearly 80 full text, consumer health magazines, providing information on many health topics including the medical sciences, food sciences and nutrition, childcare, sports medicine and general health

Tips for Searching:

Try lots of words for the same thing: Learning disability, learning deficit, learning disorder. As you find things, pay attention to the vocabulary of the database you are using. Understand different databases may use different vocabulary.
Distill your concepts into keywords, keywords should represent your concept succinctly.
Add lines in your search query for each concept.
If your keywords are a phrase, try quotation marks, “____" e.g. “learning disability”
Pay attention to mechanics of searching: did you check full text? do you need to adjust dates? etc.
Click on the Subject Terms in found articles to find more on that specific topic.

Assessing your Results:

Look beyond the first 10.
Look at your sort. By default the articles are ranked by relevance. Is that best for you?
When you see something good, READ IT—look at the subject terms and abstract.
OVERALL, stay flexible in your approach and try different strategies.

If your initial search results in too many results: