How to practice EBM: Finding the Evidence

1
How to practice EBMFinding the Evidence

• Owen Coxall, Tatjana Petrinic Nia Wyn Roberts
• Bodleian Health Care Libraries

2
Session objectives

• Formulate a focused question
• Turn a focused question into a search
• Search TRIP PubMed

3
Formulate a focused question

• Patient / Problem / Population
• Intervention
• Comparison
• Outcome

4
(No Transcript)
5
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?

6
Quick search

• TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com
• PubMed Clinical Querieswww.pubmed.gov

7
Hands-on

• Formulate a focused question
• Use your own question or one of the examples in
  your pack
• Record the search terms youre using
• Run a quick search on TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com
• Run a quick search on PubMed Clinical Queries
  www.pubmed.gov

8
Run a full search strategyWhy bother?

• Too few results
• Too many results
• Irrelevant results
• Submitting a funding proposal
• Writing a guideline
• Conducting a systematic review

9
Combine terms withOR
Smoking OR tobacco either term can be present

• smoking

tobacco
10
Combine terms withAND
Smoking AND cessation both terms must be present
smoking
cessation
11
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

12
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

13
Perform a search on PubMed
14
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

15
Hands-on

• Take your focused question
• Run further searches on PubMedhttp//www.pubmed.g
  ov

16
Help

• Finding the Evidence tutorials
• EBM web-site EBM tools Finding the
  Evidencehttp//www.cebm.net
• PubMed
• Short online tutorials
• Quick guides to PubMed basics, MeSH search and
  MyNCBI
• http//www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html