[We at Mac-Nutrition are aware now a number of readers of this blog are fellow practitioners and students so I thought I’d include this]
We only found out about this in the last year and it has helped us tremendously. In the instance that you cannot gain access to a journal or if you just want to search for resources in google you can use this little technique, if you type:
filetype:
Then the type of file you want, so this could be PDF, PPT, XLS etc. it will only bring up results that are documents of this type. So, for instance:
filetype:pdf Effect of advice to increase carbohydrate and reduce fat intake on dietary profile and plasma lipid concentrations in healthy postmenopausal women
…And voila! Free full text. Also, if you do not know the tricks to make PubMed searching easier, let us know, these are the kind of things that you are only told about in the final year of your MSc which needless to say is a bit late! Knowing sooner could save you a lot of time and effort!!
EDIT: So since writing this the first time round a few people have mentioned that we never posted the 'PubMed' tips… funny that, probably because no-one ever asked for them… 😉
PubMed Searching
So the PubMed stuff is really easy. If you use PubMed on your phone it's even easier! Anyway, first thing is for you to sign up for a PubMed account if you haven't already got one. This allows you to set some cool preferences such as default 'sort by' and 'items per page' etc. We tend to choose sort by publication date or recently added to find things that are still in press.
Onto the real helpful stuff; If you go to the Search Field Descriptions and Tags which we've kindly hyperlinked there for you, you'll see the set of tags that revolutionised PubMed searching! Some of you will be thinking, well duh! But this information allowed us to do searches in a fraction of the time… after 5 years of long laborious searching! The Tags we use the most are [TI] to search for a specific word or phrase in the title, [TIAB] for the term/phrase in the title or abstract and [AU] to search for a specific author. These are just the very basics.
Finally, take a look at the 'Limits' and 'Advanced' buttons below the Search bar. Using the 'Limits' button you can add things like the type of article you want to search for (meta-analysis, clinical trial etc) or whether you want research in humans or animals. The 'Advanced' button actually allows you to custom build a search! It will automatically insert AND, OR and NOT rules for your search.
There you have it. PubMed searching, brought to you by Mac-Nutrition! Yet again, free information provided, at absolutely no benefit to us… Other than allowing you to do your own research and realise that we desperately need to do something about the mainstream nutrition advice in this country!