Literature Search Request

Our Literature Search service is a very respected and extremely in demand service. Typically it takes a minimum of 15 hours of a specialist health research librarian’s time to complete your search. With other duties and responsibilities, this search will be conducted over a minimum of 10-15 business days.

Our Library team provides literature searches for CHS and ACT Health employees to fulfil their work priorities. Turnaround varies depending on the volume of requests received and the complexity of your search. Priority is given to searches for direct patient care.

We understand that from time to time you may require an urgent search in order to support clinical care and we will do our best to meet your needs. If your search is extremely urgent, please call us on 02 512 43394 and then fill in the form. We may need to negotiate your 'date required by'.

Please note: We do not perform searches for assessment tasks (related to university, fellowships or other post-secondary educational institutions), but we can offer limited skill building support to get you started. We strongly encourage you to avail yourself of training opportunities provided by your educational institution.

Tell us in detail what information you are looking for

For clinical information, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Who is the patient or population you are looking at? E.g. Elderly, Australian.
  2. What is the problem, exposure or phenomena you are investigating? E.g. Dementia, diabetes, smoking.
  3. What is the intervention, action, treatment or test you are considering for your patient, population or problem? E.g. Drug interventions, lab test, surgery.
  4. What other interventions, comparisons or controls do you want to consider? E.g. Physical therapy, drug therapy.
  5. What outcome are you measuring or looking for? E.g. alleviate symptoms of dementia.
  6. What is the context of your inquiry? E.g. prevalence, incidence.

For an administration, strategic or management question, ask yourself these questions:

  1. What is the purpose of your search request? What problem are you trying to solve? E.g. background information, see what others have done to solve a similar problem, improve a service.
  2. How will you use the information? E.g. draft a report, design a survey, redesign a service.
  3. Who will you share the information with? E.g. Minister, Nurse Unit Managers, cleaning staff.
How much information are you looking for? *
Do you intend to publish the outcome of your research in a peer-reviewed publication?
Please select any limits you would like applied to your search. *
What format do you want your results? *
Which citation style would you prefer?
Will this research support accreditation?
Fields marked with * are required.