Engagement, Inclusion, Recruitment, and Retention in Research Studies: How to Use This Guide
Created by Health Science Librarians
How to Select and Customize Searches
We have created instantaneous pre-formatted searches for a variety of interest areas related to recruitment. You may search by population, disease area, or topic. Each of these searches can be further customized to fit your needs.
If you don't see what you need, please use the basic recruitment search as a base and use the instructions below to customize it to get results relevant to your interest area.
Note that these searches are based on guidelines and that not all articles displayed may be relevant. If you need assistance building a more specific search, please contact a HSL librarian for assistance.
Saving Your Search
Learn how to save your search for easy access again in the future. You may want to set up various saved searches for parameters that will continue to be relevant to your particular area of research. When you return and run the search again, the results will populate including the most up to date publications.
How to Sort Results by Best Match
Be sure to see the articles that are likely to be most relevant to you by filtering the list to show "the best match" first. You can also elect to show "most recent" articles if you are re-running a saved search and interested to see if anything new has been published.
How to Get Full Text
Full Text Articles via Find@UNC
This guide explains various ways to get the full text of articles, including how to enable seeing the Find@UNC button for content the University Libraries purchases. This includes what to do when the article is not online or available through Find@UNC.
Click on the 
button in database results to:
- Go directly to most online articles
- Export article citations to Endnote or to formats for other reference managers
- Search the UNC-CH Library Catalog to find the print journal
- Send an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) request if the journal is not owned by UNC-CH
Additional PubMed Search Help
Don't forget, Ask-a-Librarian when you have difficulty finding what you're looking for.
Boolean Basics for Searching
Boolean searching helps you find fewer search results (narrows) or find more results (broadens) when you search in many databases and Web search engines. Boolean searching depends on the use of three terms: AND, OR, and NOT. Enter these terms in ALL CAPS because many search engines are case sensitive for these terms.
Additional Search Tips