Doctoral School

Next-level searching for scientific information

Cluster

Research & valorization

Target group

Doctoral candidates within research field of Life Sciences and Medicine, no foreknowledge required. 

Abstract

This in-depth course covers essential key-concepts and skills in information retrieval in multidisciplinary or topic specific databases (i.e. medicine, biomedicine, pharmaceutical sciences and nursing). It will help doctoral students to develop their knowledge and practical skills in searching and retrieving scientific evidence. Having these skills becomes increasingly important to handle the increasing amount of literature in your research area, to find applicable evidence to write research project proposals and to support your grant application, among others.

The training program covers 7 modules, based on a specific (bio)medical or multidisciplinary database in relation to its interface:

  • Ovid MEDLINE: medicine and health sciences
  • MEDLINE (via PubMed interface): medicine and health sciences
  • Embase (via embase.com interface): medicine and health sciences / pharmaceutical sciences
  • The Cochrane Library: medicine and health sciences
  • Web of Science: multidisciplinary
  • Scopus: multidisciplinary
  • CINAHL: nursing

Participants can enroll for one or multiple modules. When you've successfully followed three modules, it will be added to your curriculum as transferable skills course.

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of this course, participants will have

  • an understanding of which source is most suitable for which research question and goal,
  • an understanding of indexing and the assets of using the index terms while searching,
  • an understanding of stemming and lemmatization,
  • the skills to perform a time-efficient search for (the latest) literature,
  • the skills to use this database for a systematic review,
  • the skills to efficiently use the unique features of the source in order to enhance retrieval of information

Dates

See website

Organizing Committee & Lecturers

Knowledge Centre for Health Ghent

Prof. Renaat Peleman (Head of Department)

Ann De Meulemeester (policy advisor)

Nele Pauwels (Information Specialist)

Muguet Koobasi (Information officer)

Format

Blended learning (for each of the modules), entirely online

  1. instruction videos explaining the theory and including demo searches (approximately 1h) will be available at Ufora to watch at their own pace
  2. an exercise to perform at their own pace (1h)
  3. unsupervised peer interaction (50 min)
  4. quiz (10 min) + discussion of the exercise / quiz and question and answer session with teacher (1h)

Registration fee

Free of charge for Doctoral School members.

Registration

Follow this link

Number of participants

Maximum 10 participants per module

Language

English

Teaching and learning material

Instruction videos, slides, exercises and quizzes (wooclap) available at/via Ufora

Evaluation methods and criteria (doctoral training programme)

Full participation in the peer interaction and discussion/Q&A session + 80% on the quiz