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Qualitative Research

Online resources to aid in conducting, finding, using, synthesizing, and teaching qualitative research in the health sciences.

Database Search Filters for Qualitative Health Research

Search filters are pre-formulated search strategies that may be useful for retrieving relevant materials.  While results are not necessarily comprehensive, they often provide a good point of departure for developing your own search strategies.

PubMed Health Services Research (HSR) Queries

PubMed includes saved search strategies (queries) that may help in the identification of literature relevant to health services research, including qualitative research.

Instructions for Duke users:

  1. Connect to PubMed.

  2. Under PubMed Tools, choose Topic-Specific Queries.

  3. Choose Health Services Research (HSR) Queries.

  4. Select category Qualitative Research and choose narrow (usually preferable) or broad scope.  [Note:  To see what this actually searches, click on filter table.]

  5. Type topic terms in search box and click Go.

The narrow qualitative query looks for the words qualitative and themes in titles and abstracts of articles.  A modification of this strategy is linked below.  It includes the MeSH term Qualitative Research, which was added to the MeSH vocabulary in 2003.  Click on the strategy to run the search in PubMed, using the Duke-specific URL.  You may then add other concepts to the search.

qualitative research [MeSH] OR qualitative[tiab] OR themes[tiab]