PUBH 6005 Week 3 Literature Search Log Example

Every Source Traced to the Search That Found It: A Literature Search Log on Insulin Rationing Driven by Cost in the United States, With Search Strings, Counts, Screening Decisions and One Known Study the Searches Missed

Student Name

Walden University

PUBH 6005: Perspectives on Health and the Developing Scholar-Practitioner

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Every Source Traced to the Search That Found It: A Literature Search Log on Insulin Rationing Driven by Cost in the United States, With Search Strings, Counts, Screening Decisions and One Known Study the Searches Missed

Purpose of the Log

This log records how I searched for published research on the Week 2 topic: adults in the United States who cut back on prescribed insulin because of what it costs. Anyone repeating these searches ought to land on the same records, or see where my results would now differ. All searches were run in PubMed on October 10, 2026.

Searches Run

Table 1

PubMed Search Log

Note. [tiab] restricts terms to titles and abstracts. Counts as of October 10, 2026.

Why These Terms

"Rationing" is the word patients and journalists use; "underuse" is the word in the clinic study that first drew my attention (Herkert et al., 2019). Searching both captured more than either alone. Adding cost terms halved the results, removing records about insulin underuse for other reasons, such as fear of low blood sugar. The date limit removed only two older records, which suggests most of this literature is recent.

Screening the 29 Records

The 13 empirical studies include the single-clinic survey I already knew, a primary care clinic survey published in 2023, a national study of adults younger than 65 published in JAMA in 2023, two international online surveys of people with type 1 diabetes and several studies from 2024 to 2026 that compare states with and without insulin copay caps or examine spending after federal law changes. That last group was the most useful surprise, because it moves the topic toward the policy questions I raised in Week 2.

Table 2

Screening Decisions

Note. Decisions made by title and abstract.

A Known Study the Searches Missed

The national survey estimating that about 1.3 million US adults rationed insulin (Gaffney et al., 2022) did not appear in any of the three searches. It was published as a short research report, and its title and indexing evidently did not match my terms in the way I expected. I found it earlier through a news article. This is the most important lesson of the log: a search that misses a central study is not yet finished.

Correction Planned

I will add a search using "insulin"[tiab] AND "ration*"[tiab] to catch word variants, and I will scan the citations at the end of the two reviews kept for background. Following citations backward from strong sources is a standard way to find what keyword searches miss in evidence-based public health work (Brownson et al., 2009).

What the Log Shows About the Topic

The literature is small and recent. Most of it measures how often rationing happens and who is affected, and a growing share asks whether policy changes have reduced it. Very little measures health outcomes such as emergency visits, which matches the gap I identified in Week 2.

References

Brownson, R. C., Fielding, J. E., & Maylahn, C. M. (2009). Evidence-based public health: A fundamental concept for public health practice. Annual Review of Public Health, 30, 175-201. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.031308.100134

Gaffney, A., Himmelstein, D. U., & Woolhandler, S. (2022). Prevalence and correlates of patient rationing of insulin in the United States: A national survey. Annals of Internal Medicine, 175(11), 1623-1626. https://doi.org/10.7326/M22-2477

Herkert, D., Vijayakumar, P., Luo, J., Schwartz, J. I., Rabin, T. L., DeFilippo, E., & Lipska, K. J. (2019). Cost-related insulin underuse among patients with diabetes. JAMA Internal Medicine, 179(1), 112-114. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.5008