Finding the Evidence

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Finding the Evidence

• Nia Wyn Roberts
• Bodleian Health Care Libraries

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Session objectives

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

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Formulate a focused question

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

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Scenario
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Focused question

• P football fans
• I diet or physical activity
• C N/A
• O weight loss
• Are diet or physical activity interventions
  delivered through football clubs effective in
  promoting weight loss?

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Quick search

• TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com
• Other ways of finding secondary sources
• Cochrane Library www.cochrane.org
• Epistemonikos www.epistemonikos.org
• NICE Evidence www.evidence.nhs.uk
• Subscription based point of care tools
• Best Practice, DynaMed, UpToDate

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Hands-on

• Formulate a focused question
• Use your own question
• Record the search terms youre using
• Run a quick search on TRIPwww.tripdatabase.com

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Searching for primary studiesWhy bother?

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

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P I O
Football fan Football club Soccer fan Soccer club Diet health eating Exercise physical activity Weight Bmi body mass index
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Combine terms with OR
Healthy eating OR diet either term can be
present

• Healthy eating

diet
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Combine terms with AND
weight loss AND football both terms must be
present
Weight loss
football
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Quick tips

• Take a common word stem and look for spelling
  variations e.g.
• diet - will retrieve papers diet, diets,
  dieting, dieted
• Phrase searching
• Use double quote marks if you want words to
  appear next to each other e.g.physical
  activity

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P I O
Football fan OR Football club OR Soccer fan OR Soccer club Diet OR health eating OR Exercise OR physical activity Weight OR Bmi OR body mass index
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Develop a search strategy

1. football OR soccer
2. Diet OR healthy eating OR exercise OR
   physical activity
3. weight loss OR lose weight OR weight
   reduction OR bmi
4. 1 AND 2 AND 3

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Perform a search on PubMed
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Hands on

• Run your focused search on PubMed
• Go to http//www.pubmed.gov
• Click on Clinical Queries
• Try out the Advanced Search
• Look at the PubMed tutorials try a MeSH search

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Help

• Finding the Evidence
• EBM web-site EBM tools Finding the
  Evidencehttp//www.cebm.net
• PubMed tutorial http//www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/
  pubmed.html
• Cochrane Library tutorialshttp//www.thecochranel
  ibrary.com/view/0/HowtoUse.html