Owen Coxall Bodleian Health Care Libraries Finding the best evidence

Session objectives Formulate a focused question Turn a focused question into a search Search TRIP & PubMed Run an Advanced search on PubMed Cochrane Library

Formulate a focussed question Patient / Problem / Population Intervention Comparison Outcome

Scenario Tom, a smoker of 20 years goes to his GP to ask for help with stopping smoking. He’s tried various methods in the past but nothing has worked so far, so asks the GP whether acupuncture might be a good option.

Our PICO P = Smoking I = Acupuncture C = N/A O = Stopping smoking Is acupuncture an effective way of stopping smoking?

Quick search: Demonstration TRIP PubMed Clinical Queries

Hands-on Formulate a focussed question – Use your own question – Record the search terms you’re using Run a quick search on TRIP Run a quick search on PubMed Clinical Queries

Run a full search strategy: Why bother? Too few results Too many results Irrelevant results Submitting a funding proposal Writing a guideline Conducting a systematic review

Developing a search strategy Take your PICO and think about: – synonyms – using and/or – phrases – truncation

Combine terms with OR smoking tobacco Smoking OR tobacco – either term can be present

Combine terms with AND Smoking AND acupuncture – both terms must be present acupuncture smoking

Phrases and truncation Take a common word stem and look for spelling variations e.g. ◦ psycho* - will retrieve papers psychosis, psychoses, psychotic…but also psychology, psychological… Phrase searching ◦ Use double quote marks if you want words to appear next to each other e.g. “psychotic episode”

Develop a search strategy Using OR then AND to broaden then focus the search PIO smoker* or smoking or tobacco acupuncture or acupressure cessation or stop* or quit* and

Perform a search on PubMed

Searching tips: PubMed Subject searching - use MeSH – Subject headings added to articles on Medline – Search the MeSH Database Finding similar articles – use the ‘Related articles’ link

Search the Cochrane Library International Cochrane Collaboration >90 countries effects of interventions Includes: Full-text Systematic Reviews Abstracts to further SRs and RCTs Available at:

Resources Cochrane Library PubMed TRIP Other sources – CEBM web-site – EBM tools

Help Finding the Evidence tutorials: – eencasts eencasts PubMed – Short online tutorials – Quick guides to PubMed – basics, MeSH search and MyNCBI