1. Owen Coxall Bodleian Health Care Libraries Finding the best evidence

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

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

4. 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.

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

6. Quick search: Demonstration TRIP www.tripdatabase.com www.tripdatabase.com PubMed Clinical Queries www.pubmed.gov www.pubmed.gov

7. Hands-on Formulate a focussed question – Use your own question – Record the search terms you’re using Run a quick search on TRIP www.tripdatabase.com www.tripdatabase.com Run a quick search on PubMed Clinical Queries www.pubmed.gov www.pubmed.gov

8. 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

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

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

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

12. 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”

13. 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

14. Perform a search on PubMed www.pubmed.gov

15. 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

16. 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: http://www.thecochranelibrary.com http://www.thecochranelibrary.com

17. Resources Cochrane Library www.thecochranelibrary.com www.thecochranelibrary.com PubMed www.pubmed.gov www.pubmed.gov TRIP www.tripdatabase.com www.tripdatabase.com Other sources – CEBM web-site – EBM tools www.cebm.net www.cebm.net

18. Help Finding the Evidence tutorials: – http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/medicine/information_skills/scr eencasts http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/medicine/information_skills/scr eencasts PubMed – Short online tutorials – Quick guides to PubMed – basics, MeSH search and MyNCBI http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html