Start your paper search in your own language,then bridge to English

Let's start with an honest premise. The overwhelming majority of medical and scientific papers are written in English, and the major databases are searched primarily in English. Searching only in your own language will inevitably limit how far you can reach.

So the goal is not to do everything in your own language, but to become able to convert your questions into English searches. And that conversion happens to be exactly what AI is good at.

It's fine to begin in the language you think in. "Is there a non-drug way to reduce nighttime delirium in elderly post-surgical patients?" — make it that concrete, in your own words.

A vague question produces vague English. The quality of the translation depends on how specific the original question is. Make sure it covers three things: who, what, and what you want to do about it.

Once your question is clear, ask the AI: "I want to find English-language papers on this clinical question. Suggest search terms, including synonyms, related terms, and common abbreviations."

You'll likely get terms you'd never have come up with yourself — formal technical vocabulary, field-standard abbreviations, and so on. Don't use the candidates as-is: test them in the database, watch how the hits change, and refine and extend the list from there.

Once the results come in, watch out for this trap: skimming the English title and abstract, deciding "this doesn't look relevant," and closing the tab.

When English is a hurdle, snap judgments come too easily. If a paper looks even slightly relevant, go on to the PDF. You can still discard it later, after an AI summary in your own language has given you the full picture.

When you decide to read a paper, making sure you truly understand it in your own language makes every future search easier.

With Paperfy, uploading the PDF of an English paper puts an AI-generated summary in your preferred language on the same page as the original text. By editing that summary by hand — adding terminology notes like "so this is what it's called in English" alongside your own understanding — you build a bridge between English and your language, right inside your library. As always, verify any figures or conclusions you cite against the original English text.

Go through this process a few times and you'll notice something: the English terms that matter in your field gradually become second nature.

Starting in your own language isn't avoiding English — it's preparing for it. Build one bridge per search, and before long the English terms will come to you first.