Searching the PILOTS Database Effectively
Fred Lerner, DLS
Information Scientist, National Center for PTSD
Developing Your Search Strategy
The PILOTS Database may be searched in many different ways. Among the possibilities, you can search for:
- the writings of a particular author,
- publications from a designated journal,
- papers in which a specific assessment instrument is used,
- material in a particular language,
- studies published in a designated year or period of time, and
- articles and chapters on a particular subject.
Controlled vocabulary searching takes advantage of the work done by the database producer to standardize the terminology used by the thousands of authors and editors who produce the traumatic stress literature.
The PILOTS Thesaurus is a listing of descriptors (terms used to describe the subject content of a document) in the PILOTS Database, consisting of two parts. One is a hierarchically-arranged table of descriptors that specifies the relationship between broader and narrower terms. (For example, you would find “Neuroendocrine Testing” as the narrowest descriptor term in one hierarchy, with the term “Biologic Markers” listed as a broader term, and “Assessment” as the broadest term.)
The second part of the thesaurus is an alphabetical index listing descriptors and along with corresponding broader, narrower and related terms, and synonyms not used for indexing. If you look up one of these “entry terms,” you are referred to the appropriate descriptor. (For example, you might look up “Transgenerational Effects” and find that the appropriate descriptor is “Intergenerational Effects.”)
Natural language searching (sometimes called “free text” searching) allows you to use the terms that you are most comfortable with — it does not require you to use the PILOTS Thesaurus. And it provides a way to locate material on subjects that are too new to be included in the thesaurus, or that the thesaurus does not cover well enough for your particular need. However, it is neither as precise nor as complete a way of searching as using a controlled vocabulary. Natural language searching offers too many opportunities to retrieve irrelevant material.
For example, searching for the word “shifts” to discover papers on the effects of work schedules in exacerbating PTSD uncovered nothing on that subject — but did turn up several articles discussing paradigm shifts in the sciences underlying traumatic stress studies. That same search would not find an article whose author disdained the word “shifts” in favor of “irregular work hours.”
If you simply want to find a few publications relevant to your area of interest, natural language searching is an easy way to go about it. But if you need to make a thorough study of the literature, and you wish to be sure that you do not miss important papers, you should not rely upon natural language searching alone.
Modifying Your Search Strategy
Often, a search of PILOTS (or any other database) does not produce the results you expect. Database searching works best as an iterative process. Don’t expect to get definitive results with your first try; plan on doing an exploratory search, and then modify your search strategy according to the results. Here are some suggestions:
- If your search produces an impossibly large number of citations, examine at least a few of them to see whether you defined your topic too broadly, or used too broad a search strategy.
- If almost all of them are indeed relevant, ask yourself how you can redefine your objective. Perhaps you should choose a narrower topic: for example, natural disasters rather than disasters in general.
- If many of the citations your search has retrieved are irrelevant, you need to refine your search strategy. Look at some of the irrelevant citations, and see what they have in common. Does the same descriptor appear in all of them? If you repeated your search without using that descriptor would you be eliminating valuable citations as well as irrelevant ones? If not, you’ve found one way of bringing your search results down to a more manageable size. Other methods to refine a search might include restricting your search by language, or by date, or by format.
- Perhaps there really are very few papers in your area. (Or at least very few that have found their way into PILOTS.)
- Or perhaps your search strategy was too narrow. Again, look at your results. Find a citation that is directly relevant, and see what descriptors were applied to it. Perhaps you might want to add one or more of them to your search strategy.
- And don’t forget to double check to be sure that you weren’t done in by a simple typing error.
And what if you could find no relevant citations? Is there a paper that you know to be relevant? Then search for that paper by author and title, retrieve the citation, and see how it was indexed in PILOTS. That might suggest one or more descriptors to use in searching.
Don’t be discouraged if your first search strategy doesn’t work perfectly. Experts at database searching often have to modify their search techniques, especially when working with a database that is new to them. And don’t be surprised if you come across a citation whose indexing seems strange to you. This is a complex literature, and you may well know more about the topic than the indexer does. If you find a paper that you believe has been incorrectly indexed, please let us know. We don’t mind correcting our mistakes.
How to Obtain Copies of Materials Found in Your Search
The PILOTS Databases provides links from many citations to the full text of the underlying paper. What happens when you follow the link depends upon your relationship to the publisher. If the publisher’s website recognizes the internet address of your computer as one affiliated with a subscriber, it will give you direct access to the full text (often giving you a choice of formats in which to see or print the document). If it does not, you will usually be given the opportunity to use a credit card to purchase access to the document. In some cases the publisher may offer free access to the document you are seeking.
There are several other ways to get the publications you want. The first place to begin is your local library. Many belong to networks that make the resources of large libraries available to the clients of smaller ones. There are several organizations and companies that specialize in providing rapid copies of publications. Information brokers offer a complete range of services, from searching databases to providing copies. Document delivery services offer copies of materials from their own resources and often from other library collections. Your local librarian will know the fastest and cheapest ways to get what you need.
Access to the PILOTS Database
The PILOTS Database is produced by the National Center for PTSD. No account or password is necessary and there is no charge for using the database. Direct access to the database, and detailed instructions on using it, are available at the National Center’s Web site.
For further information, contact:
Fred Lerner, DLS, Information Scientist
National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
VA Medical Center (116D)
White River Junction, Vermont 05009
(802) 296-5132
Fax (802) 296-5135
fred.lerner@dartmouth.edu
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