EBP search strategies

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Evidence Based Practice
Finding the Evidence: Search Strategies

You now have a well-framed clinical question and have identified the category type of your question. You'll now move on to doing a search. The search strategies described on this page pertain to Ovid CINAHL and MEDLINE.

However, PubMed also allows you to do clincial queries.

Table of Contents
Overview
Asking the Clinical Question
Clinical Question Categories
Finding the Evidence: Search Strategies
Levels of Evidence and the Systematic Review
Resources

Therapy question: MEDLINE search

Ex. question: In patients with acute bronchitis, do antibiotics reduce sputum production? The PICO breakdown is: P=patients with acute bronchitis I=antibiotics C=none O=reduce sputum production. The category of the question is therapy.

Search Medline for the disease state (in this case acute bronchitis). Apply the appropriate subheadings to narrow the search.
MEDLINE Therapy Subheadings
- Therapy
- Diet therapy
- RadiotherapyTransplantation
- Nursing
- Prevention and control
- Rehabiltation
In this case, after searching for acute bronchitis, attach the subheading
Drug therapy
Continue the topical search. If applicable, limit to the appropriate age groups.
Limit the search to English and Human.
Limit the search to ebm reviews. The limit will produce results that have been critically appraised. Results will be limited to articles reviewed in the ACP Journal Club, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, DARE, CCTR.
In some cases, there will be no results after limiting to ebm reviews. If this happens, go back and limit your topical search by publication type.
Publication types for therapy articles
- clinical trial
- evaluation studies
- meta analysis
- multicenter study
- validation studies

Therapy question: CINAHL search

Ex. question: In patients with PMS, does traditional medical treatment or alternatve (complementary) treatments improve patient symptoms better? The PICO breakdown is: P=patients with PMS I=traditional medical treatment C=alternative (complementary) treatments O=improve symptoms

Search CINAHL for the disease state (in this case PMS). Apply the appropriate subheadings to narrow the search.

CINAHL Therapy Subheadings

Diet therapy
Drug therapy
Evaluation
Nursing
Prevention and control
Radiotherapy
Rehabilitation
Surgery
Therapeutic use
Therapy

Limit by english and human (and age, if appropriate).

Find the clinical evidence.

In OVID CINAHL, use the expert search Meta Analysis. Combine the results of the expert search statements with your last search statement from your topical search.
If this yields no articles, try the following limits for publication or document types

CINAHL Document Types

Clinical innovations
Clinical trial
Nursing interventions
Protocol
Research
Tables/charts

Evidence Based Practice Finding the Evidence: Search Strategies

Evidence Based Practice
Finding the Evidence: Search Strategies