This hour long workshop covered types of research, sources of information, making a searchable question, finding literature in PubMed, and how to read a journal article. Below are links to the workshop slides and the associated worksheet.
The database you choose to look for medical research in will depend on your question and its subject area. You should start by searching PubMed and if your question falls into a disciplinary area (e.g. public health, global health, psychiatry sports medicine, gerontology etc..) you can then choose a subject-specific database to do a second search in to be sure you're finding all relevant information.
If you are looking for data or statistics to show to scope and impact of your research questions there are many places to find these. Start by looking at government agencies and then expand to associations and organizations who may collect additional information on specific populations or diseases. The best place to start is our health data and statistics guide, where we list the most common sources of information by type.
PubMed is the best place to start when looking for medical research. It is one of the largest databases of peer-reviewed medical literature and it is publicly available. You can search PubMed using just free text keywords like you would a standard search engine but your search will be more effective if you use Boolean Logic (AND, OR). More information on how to construct a search using Boolean Logic can be found on our health sciences research skills guide.
To download and organize the citations you find in PubMed you can choose to download citations as a CSV or plain text file or you can download the results to import in to a citation manager. If you download a CSV file you can open that in Excel or Google Sheets and a plain text file can be opened in Word. But using a citation manager will let you use built in citation generators which will make any writing you do more efficient.
