IntroductionResearchers and clinicians are nowadays confronted with a vast and incessantly growing amount of biomedical information. The availability and constant advancement of the search instruments on the internet as well as of connected and easyto-use technologies like mobile devices often lead to the assumption that the demand for information is easily met. Unfortunately, this is not the case when it comes to high-quality and authoritative information, which is the kind of information that actually makes a difference in healthcare practice. The challenge in the daily routine within a clinic or a research setting lies in understanding one's own information needs and subsequently being able to choose the most efficient way for localizing and accessing the appropriate and best information available. Skills in systematically developing strategies for searching the medical literature are therefore vital for every healthcare practitioner who wants to take well-informed decisions.Biomedical information is traditionally available via different literature databases, which contain references to several publication types that substantially vary in their quality and ambition. This article aims to give an introduction to two important literature sources that should routinely be used in the setting of transfusion medicine, hemotherapy, immunohematology, and clinical hemostasis: PubMed and The Cochrane Library. They are presented using two application case scenarios: First, a young resident physician (Dr. Jung) who needs to find the best available evidence on granulocyte transfusions for infections in adult patients with neutropenia, because his head of department has asked him to brief his colleagues during the clinic's upcoming brown bag seminar. Second, a senior clinician (Dr. Weiss, the head of department) who plans to Keywords Databases, bibliographic · PubMed · The Cochrane Library · Information seeking behavior · Evidence-based medicine
SummaryTo be able to take well-informed decisions or carry out sound research, clinicians and researchers alike require specific information seeking skills matching their respective information needs. Biomedical information is traditionally available via different literature databases. This article gives an introduction to two diverging sources, PubMed (23 million references) and The Cochrane Library (800,000 references), both of which offer sophisticated instruments for searching an increasing amount of medical publications of varied quality and ambition. Whereas PubMed as an unfiltered source of primary literature comprises all different kinds of publication types occurring in academic journals, The Cochrane Library is a pre-filtered source which offers access to either synthesized publication types or critically appraised and carefully selected references. A search approach has to be carried out deliberately and requires a good knowledge on the scope and features of the databases as well as on the ability to build a search strategy in a structured way. We present a specific and a...