How to practice EBM: Finding the Evidence Owen Coxall & Nia Wyn Roberts Bodleian Health Care Libraries

Session objectives Formulate a focused question Turn a focused question into a search strategy Search PubMed

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

Focused question P: Pregnant smokers I: nicotine replacement C: N/A O: cessation Is nicotine replacement therapy an effective and safe smoking cessation treatment in pregnant women?

Quick search PubMed Clinical Queries

Hands-on Formulate a focused question ◦Use your own question or one of the examples in your pack ◦Record the search terms you’re using

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

PPIO Pregnant Pregnancy maternal Smoking Smoker Nicotine replacement Nicotine patch Nicotine gum Cessation Stop Quit

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

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

Quick tips Take a common word stem and look for spelling variations e.g. ◦smok* - will retrieve papers smoking, smoker, smokers… but also smoked salmon Phrase searching ◦Use double quote marks if you want words to appear next to each other e.g. “smoking cessation”

Develop a search strategy 1. pregnan* 2. smoking or smoker* 3. nicotine replacement OR nicotine patch* 4. cessation OR stop* OR quit* 5. 1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4

Perform a search on PubMed

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

Help Finding the Evidence tutorials: ◦EBM web-site – EBM tools – Finding the Evidence PubMed ◦Short online tutorials ◦Quick guides to PubMed – basics, MeSH search and MyNCBI

Hands-on Practice turning PICO into search strategy Take your focused question: Run further searches on PubMed