_KINS5508: Exercise Prescription for Individuals with Chronic Diseases and Health Conditions

On this page of the research guide, you will learn:

Once you've engaged with all the content on this page, you should:

The Cochrane Library is a collection of multiple databases. Their focus is on supporting high-quality, evidence-based care. The specific Cochrane database you're interested in is the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, a collection of peer-reviewed systematic reviews by Cochrane Review Groups. You'll search the whole Cochrane Library, but will only need to look at the results in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

Because the Cochrane Library is a much smaller database than PubMed, you may not use as many elements of your research question in your search as you did there. Consider starting with just two main ideas at most as you translate your search strategy. Like PubMed, Cochrane allows you to search using a combination of keywords and MeSH terms. While the Cochrane Library uses MeSH as its controlled vocabulary, the syntax for searching differs from PubMed.

Watch the video to learn how to adapt your PubMed search to Cochrane.

Further down this page, you'll find a reference box that provides text examples of important elements covered in this video.

Now that you've watched the video, you're ready to translate and execute your search in the Cochrane Library.

Following are some ways that Cochrane Library syntax differs from PubMed, all of which are demonstrated in the video above.

MeSH syntax

In PubMed, the syntax to search MeSH terms is: "walking" [mesh]

In Cochrane, the syntax is: [mh walking] For a MeSH term that contains more than one word, enclose the term in quotation marks: [mh "cell phone"]

In PubMed, to avoid exploding a MeSH term, the syntax is: "exercise" [mesh:noexp]

In Cochrane, the syntax is [mh ^exercise] To avoid exploding a MeSH term that contains more than one word, put the caret outside the quotation marks: [mh ^"cell phone"]

Keyword searching

You'll do your keyword searches in the Search Manager, in the default Title Abstract Keyword option. This actually searches searches the MeSH terms as well. As a result, when you OR together your keyword and MeSH searches for a concept, the total may not be much bigger than the keyword search alone.

Single keywords don't require any special treatment; the syntax would simply be: walking Single keywords can be truncated: walk*

Keyword phrases must be enclosed in quotation marks: "endurance training" However, words in quotation marks cannot be truncated. The workaround is to use NEXT to require words to be found in order and directly beside one another, or NEAR to require words be within a short distance of one another (the default is within 6 words).

A couple of examples:

• PubMed: "cell phone*" [tiab] vs. Cochrane: (cell* NEXT phone*)
• PubMed: "mobile health tech*" [tiab] vs. Cochrane: (mobile NEAR tech*)

Truncation & Wildcards

The asterisk * stands in for 1 or more characters at the beginning of a word, 1 or more characters at the end of a word (after at least 3 characters), or multiple characters within a word.

The question mark ? can be used as a wildcard to replace 0 characters or 1 character within or at the end of a word. That allows you to use wom?n to find woman or women or system? to find systems but not systemic.

Most databases allow you to download your search strategy. To do so in the Cochrane Library, go to the Search Manager and tap the Print search history button. This downloads your search history as a text (.txt) file. These generally open in a text-based program like Notepad if it's installed on your computer already, but you can also open them in Microsoft Word.

Downloading your searches allows you to easily see and document how you searched as well as to re-execute searches by copying and pasting search strings.

Have you:

Then you're ready to move on to the next page, Dealing with Duplicate References!