Do you ever worry that you’re not searching for relevant literature as effectively as you could be? Do you find yourself wading through a high number of irrelevant references found by a haphazard Google Scholar or Pubmed search? Have you been asked to record and describe your search strategy, and aren’t sure how to do that? Help is at hand.

The Medical Library has developed a new course, aimed at University of Cambridge students and researchers, designed to walk you through the basics of literature searching. (NHS staff should book onto our equivalent course, Getting the best results – improving your database searching, which covers the same content, but using NHS Athens accessible databases.) The course is intended to be either an introduction or a refresher for those who have had no, or minimal, formal literature searching training.

The first session will take place on Monday, 1st April, and you can book a place here by logging in with Raven and following the prompts. The course will repeat on a roughly monthly basis, so choose a later session if you can’t make it on 1st April.

Attendance at this session (or at the NHS equivalent) is a prerequisite for attending the library’s systematic reviews training course.