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Finding the best evidence. Owen Coxall Bodleian Health Care Libraries. 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.
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Finding the best evidence Owen CoxallBodleian Health Care Libraries
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 TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com PubMed Clinical Querieswww.pubmed.gov
Hands-on Formulate a focussed question • Use your own question • Record the search terms you’re using Run a quick search on TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com Run a quick search on PubMed Clinical Queries www.pubmed.gov
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 withOR smoking Smoking OR tobacco – either term can be present tobacco
Combine terms withAND Smoking AND acupuncture – both terms must be present smoking acupuncture
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 ANDto broaden then focus the search and and
Perform a search on PubMed www.pubmed.gov
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:http://www.thecochranelibrary.com
Resources Cochrane Librarywww.thecochranelibrary.com PubMedwww.pubmed.gov TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com Other sources – CEBM web-site – EBM toolswww.cebm.net
Help Finding the Evidence tutorials: • http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/medicine/information_skills/screencasts PubMed • Short online tutorials • Quick guides to PubMed – basics, MeSH search and MyNCBI http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html