Today I met with David Flynn, one of the knowledgeable and very helpful librarians, at Boston University Medical Library.
I told David for conducting a review of literature, I usually use Google to see the magnitude of the literature in the field, and then I search in Cochran Systematic Review, PubMed, Medline and Lexis Nexis.
I told him I also use the advanced search option in Google by choosing language and file type. I asked him if he can help me to learn more about advanced search in Google.
He taught me a very powerful trick in advanced search. It is very useful specially for conducting search on Public Health stuff.
As you know Medline searches among peer reviewed papers and articles. When you want to learn about WHO guidelines, lesson learned by NGOs and those materials as non peer reviewed web published you need to take advantage on 1 billion $ Google search engine.
So the trick is, go to advanced search, put your keywords, language as well as file type. Then in the Search within a site or domain box input the .org if you want Google search your words among NGOs, put .who.int/en (if you want Google does search for you among WHO materials in English), put .edu ( if you want Google conducts the search among universities), and put .gov (if you are looking for materials in Governments websites such as CDC).
Today I enjoyed this trick with finding priceless stuff in Best Practices in International Health. I hope you enjoy it as well.
Filed under: Blogroll, Tools | Tagged: Advanced Google Search
