In this episode, Tracy and Carrie (but mostly Tracy, because Carrie lets her talk more than she should) talk about searching. We don’t necessarily get into how to search. What we do talk about is how we think about searching, some minutiae of naming conventions for search documents, and some of our favorite searches.
PubMed is probably where we search the most, for obvious reasons - medical librarians are going to search the medical literature, and that’s a great place to start. We mention grey literature, which is basically everything outside of peer-reviewed journal articles, so it can be a lot.
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Documenting searches - outside of systematic reviews, that is - is a whole thing. We both try to accommodate the search requesters in how we report back searches. There are no right or wrong ways to do that and everyone has their own way, including how they name their search documentation files (and PubMed collections, as Tracy mentioned she does). Admittedly, Tracy’s system is probably more complex than most, and is constantly evolving based on users’ needs. There are also many ways to track and get metrics on searches - hours spent on searches, number of searches in platforms, number of search requests, etc.
Carrie and Tracy are big believers in thinking about searches before doing the actual searches. Searching is intuitive. Searching is an art. And yes, we google things. Lots of things. We are just really good a googling. Wikipedia is a pretty great source, too.
Some of the discussion of searches or search topics are vague, because they are sensitive, potentially pre-published works, or cannot be discussed in detail for other reasons. We have favorite searches; Carrie likes physical or occupational therapy searches and critical care topics. Tracy has a top 10 list, including one about insensible fluid loss, and a case report about Earl Grey tea intoxication. Here’s Tracy’s PubMed collection on knitting and crochet injuries - something she did just for fun. Tracy also did a Twitter thread about one search that led her to find an article where an intoxicated person “accidentally” ingested a cell phone.
Carrie mentioned the importance of a comprehensive search (which we will probably discuss more in our systematic review searching episode). The situation she mentioned was a healthy volunteer death in a hexamethonium asthma study at Johns Hopkins in 2001.
For the record, Carrie picks the blooper intros. Tracy sounds like a cross between the “wicked witch of the East, bro” viral video and an interrupting cow, and apologized to Carrie multiple times for that. :-)
