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Physician Assistant

Record the Research

When You Cannot Find Enough Evidence

REMEMBER: Not every PICO will have an article.

Therefore, you will need to think critically and decide what information is the most important to find for your question.

You have flexibility in choosing a topic for your paper

Design your PICO around the available evidence

Re-examine your search terms 

Broad your search by adding more synonyms

Consider using similar or related populations, interventions, or outcomes

Determine is the information you have could answer your question

 

How to Search

Clinical Queries

PubMed Clinical Queries quickly find evidence without performing a full literature search.

1. Access the database

2. Under “Find”, select Clinical Queries

 

3. Enter the term

4. Select one of the five categories in the Filter

  • Etiology - Search terms related to cohort studies and risk.
  • Diagnosis - Search terms related to diagnosis, specificity or sensitivity.
  • Therapy (default choice) - Search terms related to clinical trials, controlled trials, random allocation, and therapeutic use.
  • Prognosis - Search terms related to prognosis, cohort studies, follow-up studies, incidence, and prediction.
  • Clinical Prediction Guides - Uses language related to validation, observer variation, predictive value, and scoring systems.

5. Determine one of the scopes:

  • Broad - Sensitive search – includes relevant citations but probably less relevant; will retrieve more (default)
  • Narrow - Specific search – will get more precise, relevant citations but less retrieval

1. Access the database.

2. Select Advanced Search.

3. In the FILTERS tab, select the following filters:

  • Evidence-Based Practice and the type of result you want to find, for example, Research Article or Meta-Synthesis.
  • Publication Date and any other filters you need to narrow your search.

MeSH = Medical Subject Headings

  • It is a controlled organization of terms in PubMed,  MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Cochrane Databases
  • MeSH headings are assigned by librarian specialists at the National Library of Medicine
  • MeSH terms are applied after a librarian has read the article
  • The MeSH headings tell you what the article is about, saving you time
  • MeSH is updated yearly, therefore, new articles will not have yet, been assigned a MeSH. Therefore you must search with both keywords and MeSH, this search will capture all of the articles you are looking for