A Comparative Systematic Search of Literature: A Basic and Simple Approach

Background:-Literature is the mainstay of research. It provides all the essential information which is a pre-requisite for performing research. Literature can be retrieved by systematic or non-systematic approach. The systematic approach provides a more robust method for obtaining the literature. There are many databases that can be used to gather the literature, some are free while most of them are subscription based. Methods:-We developed a research question “Does tamoxifen improve breast cancer outcomes” and extracted the literature from all possible free of access databases and one subscription-based database using the PICOT driven keywords. We did not change keywords for any database. We used the help of truncation, quotation, field tags, and Boolean parenthesis for extracting the literature as per the database guidance. Results:-We observed more literature retrieval with Google search, but the outcome was a collection of articles, news, blogs, images, and forums. Other databases extracted only articles. Conclusion:-Google search is not advised for collecting literature owing to the variability of its outcome. Google Scholar gives reasonably fair outcomes if used within its character limitation and less complex search. PubMed, Cochrane Central, and EBSCOhost allow complex searches with minimal variability. PubMed does not need a quotation search if using a filtered search as the results are alike.