2020 Summer Conference: Morwenna Rogers and Alison Bethel

The 2020 UHMLG Summer Conference is focusing on tools to help with systematic reviews. With a workshop on Thursday and presentations on Friday, it promises to be an interesting, informative and practical event. With the opportunity to network with colleagues from across the HE and NHS sectors, it’s a great value event for all health and medical librarians.

Choosing the Right Databases and Search Techniques

Systematic reviews require search strategies that find all the relevant studies but without overloading review teams with thousands of irrelevant references. With hundreds of bibliographic databases available and many different methods of searching for information, planning a strategy for finding studies within a systematic review context may seem daunting. 

In this interactive talk, we will share ways of choosing the best databases and search techniques to match particular research questions and review types. We will aim to demonstrate that with careful planning, it is possible to run complex searches transparently, robustly and efficiently.

Biography: Morwenna Rogers

Morwenna Rogers works for the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Peninsula Applied Research Collaboration (PenARC), and is based at the University of Exeter Medical School. As an information specialist, Morwenna’s main role is to design and run searches for systematic reviews covering many health topics including child health, dementia care, mental health, and implementation science. Together with the Evidence Synthesis Team and the Information Specialist team at Exeter, Morwenna also carries out search methods research focusing on the performance of medical databases, search filters and methods for finding studies where topics are poorly defined. Together with Alison Bethel, in 2019 she co-authored a chapter on choosing the right databases and search techniques in the textbook ‘Systematic Searching’.