Nursing and Allied Health: Google Advanced Search for EBM

Google Advanced has been on the internet since 2000.  Using Google Advanced offers many benefits over using Google to search for Systematic Review and other types of articles. 

You can search within PubMed or for another authoritative source on the internet.

• Fortunately, some authoritative sources are easily to identify such as government sources such as ClinicalTrials.Gov, The Food and Drug Administration, the National Library of Medicine. 
• Other sources are a bit murkier. For instance, a good non-governmental source (not for profit organization: 503C) such as the  American Diabetes Association, The America Cancer Society or other non-profit 503C corporations also have systematic reviews.. 
• A third type of reputable website is a publisher website which may offer fee-based access.  Examples of a fee based website might be Wiley Publishers, Sage Journals, Elsevier Science Direct or a nursing journal.  Nursing blogs are generally not a good source of Evidence Based Medicine
• Remember that you can request most articles that you find on the Internet through Nursing Inter-library Loan. (ILL-Nursing)

If you have difficulty differentiating between sources of peer-reviewed articles within Evidence Based Medicine, check with your medical  librarian.

PubMed is part of the National Library of Medicine, under the National Institute of Health a governmental agency .  Like PubMed, the University Databases (CINAHL Complete, Medline (EBSCO), Proquest , PubMed) have additional features (added value) if you search them directly within the database.  Nevertheless, some students like to search on the Internet.  This tutorial shows you some of the filters available within Google Advanced Search.

When you search Google Advanced Search, you will notice it has similar functionality to subscription databases the university pays for.   However, it falls short in many areas.  Let's look at a search for systematic reviews in the area of diabetes.

• searching all of the terms

• searching any of the terms

• searching "nested terms" (finds terms together)

• filtering to specific regions (such as USA)

• filtering to a specific language (English)

• filtering to a region

• setting a customized date range

• seeking only a specific document type (PDF)

• Include the PubMed full address

• Do not limit to PDF document type

• Customizing date:most current 5 year

• Select Verbatim

• Change the language to English in the settings menu

• Searching Google Scholar in Google Advanced Search 

• Setting permanent settings from the Google results page

• Searching multiple terms and nested terms