Evidence-based dental practice: searching the literature and writing a report

This guide provides a brief introduction on searching for information for a literature review on an oral health topic. The goals of the guide are

• To provide guidance on finding a research question
• To organize concepts from searching into keyword and indexing terms, which can be used for searching database
• To train in database searching in some of the article databases available at the University of Toronto

This guide will not cover comprehensive searching for knowledge synthesis (KS). For KS searching, please refer to the Gerstein Science Information Centre's guide: "Knowledge syntheses: Systematic & Scoping Reviews, and other review types", or you can book a consultation with a librarian at the Dentistry Library. 

Searching is an iterative process and it varies depending on which resources you have available and the type of information you need for a literature review. To simply a complex process, we organized searching into a few steps. These are sometime iterative, especially when searching a new topic. 

1) Identify the main concepts or keywords for your topic

2) Determine the right database for your information needs

3) Planning a search

4) Document the search

5) Evaluate what you find (not covered in this guide)

This guide provides more details and information on each of these steps. If you have any questions about the content of this guide or searching for oral health literature, please don't hesitate to contact us.