Reflecting on Week 4 of the LIHNN Literature Searching MOOC

6 11 2015

Ooh, lots of great tips and tricks in this week’s installment of the LIHNN Literature Searching MOOC!  This week’s REFINE topic covered lots of real-life literature searching dilemmas that I’ve never before seen covered in any formal teaching – only ever discussed in my own team or at LIHNN Clinical Librarians Groups (great stuff, MOOC creators :-))

My own favourite tip was around the use of search filters in HDAS.  I have been using the publication type filter in Medline, when in fact it is not 100% reliable.  There are more watertight search filters, as published on the InterTASC pages, and these can be replicated in HDAS.  As most of these filters are quite detailed (and therefore quite long), the MOOC suggests that you save a search filter as a separate search so you can then re-run it at the end of any searches that you need to apply the filter to.  Genius (why have I never done this before?!)!  This is something I’ll definitely be trying.

Another highlight this week was the quiz.  I have been known to enjoy a good quiz, and I thought the quiz this week was excellent.  It’s something I can see myself using in training sessions with end users, because it really helped me to think about different techniques and the circumstances in which I’d employ them.

Finally, a MOOC tip from me: don’t eat an apple while doing the MOOC, the crunching invariably drowns out Michelle’s lovely narration and means you have to keep winding back to listen to the bits you missed :-/


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