Instructor: Hi, everyone.
In today's video,
we are going to walk through finding and selecting
scientific and epidemiological articles
that we'll use throughout the course.
So, in a number of the assignments
spanning the discussion board, the commentary piece,
your final presentations, and the literature review,
you'll need to go into the primary literature
and look for studies
concerning different cancer topics of interest
and the epidemiology of specific cancer topics.
So, after you select your topics for the presentation
at the beginning of the course, for example,
and while you're conducting
the literature review assignment,
you'll need to dig into some databases
to look for articles
that are going to support your final presentations.
So, we're here on the National Library of Medicine website
looking at the PubMed database,
and I'm gonna walk you through some of the tips and tricks
for finding and selecting articles
that we'll use for these different assignments.
And so, I think it's easiest to do that
if we use an example.
And for this example, I will search for articles
about a topic that I'm somewhat familiar with,
so we'll be looking for articles
about breast cancer prevention in Syria.
And so, to begin with,
I'm gonna navigate to this center search box
and just type in breast cancer prevention in Syria.
And then, we'll search,
and we see here that there's 15 results.
We see some important information on the left side,
so and some different filtering options.
So, here we see we can sort by year,
so the first article that came up by the search
was published in 1971,
the most recent article in 2023.
If I play with these circles,
I can improve the search area.
So, for example, I think here I'm primarily interested
in more recent data and more recent articles
so I'm going to move the bar to about the mid-2000s.
That way I'll get this
all of these articles that have been published
between 2007 and 2023.
And we see now that there's 13 results,
so two articles of the initial 15 were eliminated.
Next, we see on this left side
that the text availability so of these articles,
is the abstract available,
is the full text available for free,
or is the full text available in some other format
or not for free behind some paywall?
And for these, I'm gonna leave these alone
because even if the full text isn't available for free
on this database,
I might be able to look it up on the UVM Medical Library
and be able to access it for free.
Next, we see that there's a couple
of different article types listed,
so books and documents, clinical trials, meta-analysis,
randomized control trials, reviews, and systematic reviews.
For these assignments, we're mostly gonna be focusing
on articles that discuss randomized control trials,
clinical trials, books and documents.
These meta-analysis, reviews, and systematic reviews
are going to be great
for looking to see a breadth of different articles
that all discuss your topic of interest.
And then, once you find
a review article or systematic review,
you then can find the individual citations
of the articles that were examined as part of that review
and read the original articles.
And then here, another option for limiting publication date
to the one year prior, five years prior, or 10 years prior.
But because there's not that many articles
involved in this search right now, there's only 13,
I'm gonna take some time to go through them.
We also see up here in the display options,
we can sort or we can display the summaries of the articles,
the abstracts, and then some PubMed metadata
or the PubMed ID.
I'm gonna leave it displaying the summary of the article
because that shows some key information,
including the title, the authors,
the journal in which the article is published,
the publication date,
and then the first few lines of the abstract.
I'm going to continue sorting it by most recent
and leave it as displaying 10 per page.
Okay, great.
So, to begin looking at the searches,
we see this first article is about breast cancer beliefs
and screening practices among Syrian refugee women
and Jordanian women.
It has some authors,
none of their names are initially familiar to me.
And the reason that I bring up the authors of the article
is because sometimes depending on the geographic region,
or the population, or a specific method,
or a specific type of cancer,
there may not be many researchers working on that
so you may see the same person's name over and over again
in different articles.
They might be one of your colleagues now or in the future,
so it's always interesting to look.
And then, as we'll see later on in this video,
it's possible to see where each author
of an article is affiliated with,
or their university, or their institution.
So, for example, we might know if an article
and if the study was conducted by people within a country,
within a community, or somewhere international.
We also might know whether it was a mix of authors
from different institutions
or all from the same institution.
And we might also know,
or we might be able to glean from that information
if a particular institution
has a lot of research ongoing in one area.
So, next we see the name of the journal
that the article was published in,
so here's the International Journal
of Environmental Research and Public Health.
We see that it was published in February of 2023,
so it was published quite recently.
And we can read the first couple of sentences
of the abstract right here.
So, I see that this article is going to discuss
breast cancer beliefs and screening practices
amongst Syrian refugee women and Jordanian women.
And I am, for example, looking for information
about prevention, less about screening,
but more about upstream factors
that people might partake in
or avoid in order to prevent breast cancer
at the primary level.
So, next I'll look at the next article.
Again, I look at the authors,
I don't recognize any of their names.
I see that it was published in 2022 in June,
so about a year went by or a little over a year went by
between the publication of these two articles.
And I see that this article is really about
is more of a medical or clinical article
and less of an epidemiological and public health article
than what I'm looking for.
So, for example, and we see that reflected
in the name of the journal,
the Journal of Medical Case Reports.
This could be an interesting article,
it's titled Cancer in Five Countries
of the Eastern Mediterranean Region:
Epidemiological Trends and Risk Implications.
But at the same time, we see it's quite broad
so it's gonna talk about cancer in five countries,
it's not specific to Syria
and it's not specific to breast cancer.
Here we see that this article assessment
of breast cancer risk among Iraqi women in 2019
is very specific to both breast cancer and to Iraqi women,
though we are looking for information about Syrian women.
Similarly, we see here the effect of health education
given to Syrian refugee women in their own language
on awareness of breast and cervical cancer in Turkey,
a randomized controlled trial.
So, here we see that the study design
is actually listed in the title of the article.
We see that it's about Syrian women
and who are living in Turkey
and we see that it focuses on breast and cervical cancer.
So, rather than going through all 13 hits in this search,
I'm going to return to the first,
the first article because it seems like this one
might be an interesting article to read
for our literature review.
So, as I mentioned before,
we'll see the the name of the journal,
the date it was published,
the title, and the names of the authors all replicated here.
And then, this useful button Affiliations expand,
we can click on to look at where all these people are based.
So, we see that the author with the affiliation
or the authors with the affiliation one are from Houston.
We see that there's someone
from the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
We see that someone
is from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston as well.
So, a lot of Houston-based researchers
and then some Jordanian-based researchers.
Here, again, we get a chance to view the abstract,
though rather than just the first few lines,
we get to read the whole thing.
So, scanning the abstract,
we see that this article is going to discuss
Syrian refugee woman and Jordanian woman and compare them,
and they're living close
to the Syrian-Jordanian border city of Ar-Ramtha.
We see that it uses the tool
the Cancer Screening Beliefs Questionnaire,
the Breast Cancer Screening Beliefs Questionnaire,
and that the n-value was 138
for the Syrian refugee women group
and the 160 for the Jordanian woman group.
Some basic demographic statistics
of the study sample are reported here
as well as some of the p-values
and confidence intervals for the main findings.
So, here we see that Syrian refugee women
and Jordanian women reported low attitudes
towards general health checkup.
The mean score for Syrian refugees is 45.6
versus 42.04 among Jordanian women
with a p-value of .150.
We see that Syrian refugees encounter higher barriers
for breast cancer screening than Jordanian women.
And that women with higher education
were more likely to report fewer barriers to screening.
We see too, at the very end of the abstract,
some future steps that future studies might take.
And this can be important both in crafting your presentation
when identifying a gap in the literature
and something that you might decide to propose
as the presentation,
and it also can be an interesting angle
to take in your commentary piece.
If numerous articles are saying that there's a gap
in the literature.
As, for example, here it's saying that the study
documents a significant lack
of breast cancer screening awareness
among Syrian refugee women and Jordanian women,
indicating that future work is needed
to alter current attitudes toward mammograms
and early detection measures.
You could write a commentary
talking about the need for decreasing stigma
associated with mammograms and increasing the uptake
of mammograms through community education programs
or through school
or university best based education programs.
In contrast to a potential angle for the commentary piece,
looking at this article and formulating a hypothesis
or formulating a project proposal for your presentation
for this course, you could propose a research project
on really understanding current attitudes towards mammograms
and what the rationale or what the reasons are
behind this lack of breast cancer screening awareness.
So, there is a lack of awareness, what is it?
What are the barriers?
And that's all we know from reading this abstract.
Certainly by reading the article,
the article might touch upon some of the possible barriers,
but you could certainly propose examining barriers
to breast cancer screening
in this context in a different context,
in Syrian refugee women living in a different country.
There's numerous possibilities
and directions to go with this.
The last two pieces that I'll note
when looking at this screen
is this very useful button called Cite.
So, if you click on Cite,
it'll give you options to cite this piece in AMA style,
APA style, MLA style, and NLM style.
In this course we use AMA style,
which is already pulled up
and then you can copy the citation
into your commentary piece,
or in your presentation, or in your proposal.
And so, when you copy this, it's great to use this tool.
It's always important to ensure that it's properly cited
because some articles
might have the metadata inputted wrong,
so it might produce a citation that it says is AMA,
but is, in fact, not AMA.
Finally, here we see that this article is available
for free through PubMed Central
as well as through MDPI.
There's really no difference,
you'll get the same text
and same article and figures by clicking on either link,
but some articles won't be available for free
so you'll need to go to the UVM library website
and copy and paste the title of the article
and search for the article there.
But here it is available, so we'll click on free full text,
another tab will open, and here we see the article,
and we can read through the article
and get the relevant pieces of information.
I hope that this video is helpful,
and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions
about searching for or selecting articles
for your projects in this course.