Searching for published research literature in any discipline requires skills and knowledge about where and how to search. Yet the field of palliative care offers its own challenges:

• The literature is 'diffuse', ie, there are wide range of topics of interest to, but not the sole domain of, palliative care.
• Relevant literature lies not only in the specialty palliative journals, but also in general journals. It is also found in domains outside of biomedicine, such psychology, theology, philosophy, ethics, sociology (each with their own databases).
• As an emerging field, the nomenclature (the language it uses) takes time to develop. There may be a lack of consistent terminology and descriptiveness in manuscripts.
• Authors (especially those outside of palliative care) may not nominate palliative subject headings in the editorial process, nor use language in writing an article itself, to identify it as being of interest to palliative care.
• Some relevant questions in palliative care are difficult to answer using randomised controlled trials, or have not yet been formally studied. The best available evidence may lie in unpublished papers, reports and theses, or else be published in journals not indexed in databases such as PubMed.

Various pages in CareSearch are designed to help you search well despite these factors. Databases and Resources provide immediate links to high quality, freely available databases that index published research. CareSearch Grey Literature identifies unpublished and unindexed palliative literature. CareSearch Systematic Review Collection gathers relevant reviews identified through searching multiple databases and reference lists. Search Filters and PubMed Topic Searches provide you with evidence based search strategies, and Learning to Search, Systematic Searching and Searching the Web provide you with background information and knowledge to support learning how to search effectively.

This page was created on 30 April 2008 and is due for review in April 2010