Health Care Administration and Policy

Once you've chosen a topic and have created a focused research question, you're ready to search the literature!

• Topic: How can we improve healthcare and lower costs?
• Research question: Can the use of electronic healthcare records systems improve the quality and cost of healthcare?

General Searching Tips for most research databases, including Google Scholar:

• Use " " to search for a specific phrase like "electronic health records".
• Use * to get all forms of a word: child* = child, children, childhood.
• Use ( ) with OR between synonyms to group synonyms for expanded searching: (AZ OR Arizona).
• Use AND between synonym groups to add groups together in keyword searching: (AZ OR Arizona) AND (child* OR adolescen* OR teen*)

Below are 4 major search strategies:

• Basic Keyword search
  • Advantages - Quick and easy, uses everyday words and phrases or discipline-specific terminology; likely to get most up to date results including references that haven't been indexed with the research databases' subject headings.
  • Disadvantages - May not retrieve all of the best results; depends on the words you choose to use.
• Synonyms Keyword search
  • Advantages - Broader than a basic keyword search, gets more results; you can use everyday words and discipline-specific terminology.
  • Disadvantages - May not retrieve all of the best results; depends on the words you choose to use.
• Targeted Keyword search (searching for keywords in the title of references, or in the title and abstract of references)
  • Advantages - Often more relevant results since the title or the title and abstract will reference the most important topics of the study/article; use the Subject Headings (listed in each article's information) or other important keywords you see in these highly relevant results to build another, more expanded search.
  • Disadvantages - More restrictive than general keyword searching.
• Subject Heading search
  • Advantages - Get targeted, subject-specific results quickly, regardless of the words used in the title, abstract, or elsewhere.
  • Disadvantages - May not retrieve the most up to date results if those results haven't had subject headings applied to them; may not match up with all articles on the topic, though it should get the majority of the topic-focused results.

First Basic Keyword Search

cost effective healthcare and electronic healthcare records

Expanded Synonyms Keyword Search

• Group synonyms with ()
• Use all caps for the OR between each synonym in the groups, and for the AND between each group of synonyms

(cost OR cost-effectiv*) AND (health care OR healthcare) AND (electronic health records OR EHR)

Targeted Keyword Search

• More relevant results
• May leave out results that use different words to describe the topic, and/or that don't use these keywords in the title or in the abstract

Keywords in Title:

• use [ti] after each keyword

(cost[ti] OR cost-effectiv*[ti]) AND (health care[ti] OR healthcare[ti]) AND (electronic health records[ti] OR EHR[ti])

Keywords in Title/Abstract:

• use [title/abstract] after each keyword

(cost[title/abstract] OR cost-effectiv*[title/abstract]) AND (health care[title/abstract] OR healthcare[title/abstract]) AND (electronic health records[title/abstract] OR EHR[title/abstract])

Keywords in Title:

Keywords in Title/Abstract:

Subject Heading Search:

• In PubMed, the subject headings are called 'MeSH' - Medical Subject Headings.  Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and some other databases use MeSH or similar headings as well
• Most research databases use subject headings of some type
• In PubMed, use [mh] or [Mesh] after each keyword

(Not sure what the MeSH subject headings are for your topic?  See below for how to search the MeSH index.)

PubMed MeSH Search

 (("Costs and Cost Analysis"[Mesh] OR "Cost-Benefit Analysis"[Mesh] OR "Health Care Costs"[Mesh] OR "Hospital Costs"[Mesh])) AND "Electronic Health Records"[Mesh])

Search the MeSH Index for a MeSH heading