PubMed Quick Tip #1

Use the [ti] or [ab] tag to find a specific word or phrase in the title or abstract of a paper

Ex: mentoring [ti] AND effectiveness[ab]

Advanced PubMed Searching in Four Steps

Here's a sample research question:
"Do medical students benefit from peer mentoring?"

A possible search phrase could be:

students, medical AND peer group AND (mentors OR teaching OR learning)

Like to know how to get your searches to be short and to the point?

(1) Think of how you can break your research question into multiple concepts

(2) Connect the concepts with the appropriate Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT - these must be capitalized)
AND - connects different concepts
OR - connects synonyms / similar concepts
NOT - excludes a concept / word

(3) Find the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms assigned to an article
* MeSH terms are assigned to every article in PubMed to help classify the topics of a paper
* Select the Citation Display of an abstract to see the MeSH terms for that article

(4) Use MeSH terms to build more complex searches

Popular Medical Education Journals

Here are some of the most widely read journals in the field of medical education. These are ideal journals to browse online (requires campus or VPN connection) to learn more about hot topics in medical education. These also give you ideas of where you might want to publish your research one day.

Academic Medicine

BMC Medical Education

Clinical Teacher

JAMA (September Medical Education issues - 2006 -- 2005 -- 2004 )

Medical Education - also check out their May & Nov issues for the "Really Good Stuff" section

Medical Teacher

Teaching & Learning in Medicine

Other medical specialty journals:

Academic Emergency Medicine

Advances in Health Sciences Education

TIP: Use PubMed to have the table of contents of these journals sent to your email or RSS reader.