Searching for articles
Articles published in peer-reviewed journals are perhaps the most important source of literature for your thesis. These can best be found by searching subject databases such as PubMed, Embase, PsycInfo as well as multi-disciplinary databases such as Web of Science and Scopus. PubMed is publicly accessible while your library’s databases depend on which they subscribe to.
PubMed/Medline
One of the most important databases you should use to find articles for your thesis is PubMed. Pubmed is produced in the United States by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) a department of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is part of the National Institute of Health (NIH).
PubMed contains over 22 million citations from international peer-reviewed biomedical journals, regional and local journals as well as a selection of freely accessible e-books. PubMed provides you with references to articles published in many different countries and in many different languages. In addition to the basic reference consisting of journal name, title of article, author names, abstracts, etc. keywords are added to the database entry.
Your university library might also hold classes on using PubMed. Check your library’s home page.
MOVE ON!
Get the most out of PubMed by starting right from the beginning:
Create a NCBI-account and save your searches, set up email alerts and change your display settings. You should consider changing the following settings in NCBI Site Preferences:
Highlight your search terms – keywords – in your results using your preferred color.
Open abstract supplemental data to automatically see MeSH terms and use them as an inspiration to further searching.
Result display settings – Consider changing this setting to show the Abstract view as your default format. You will no longer need to click on the heading of each result to see the abstract.
Outside tool – Select your university library, for example: ”University of Southern Denmark, SDU” or ”Det Kongelige Bibliotek” (The Royal Library). This activates a special button (as shown below) that tells you whether you have full text access to the article through your university library or if you will need to order the article through the order form provided.
You will then need to log in using your library ID.
