How to practice EBM: Finding the Evidence

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How to practice EBMFinding the Evidence

• Owen Coxall Nia Wyn Roberts
• Bodleian Health Care Libraries

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Session objectives

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

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Formulate a focused question

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

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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?

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Quick search

• PubMed Clinical Querieswww.pubmed.gov

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Hands-on

• Formulate a focused question
• Use your own question or one of the examples in
  your pack
• Record the search terms youre using

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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

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P P I O
Pregnant Pregnancy maternal Smoking Smoker Nicotine replacement Nicotine patch Nicotine gum Cessation Stop Quit
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Combine terms withOR
Smoking OR tobacco either term can be present

• smoking

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

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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

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Perform a search on PubMed
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Searching tips PubMed

• Subject searching - use MeSH
• Subject headings added to articles on Medline
• Search the MeSH Database
• See MeSH Tutorials for more information
• Finding similar articles use the Related
  articles link

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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

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Hands-on

• Practice turning PICO into search strategy
• Take your focused questionRun further searches
  on PubMedhttp//www.pubmed.gov