How to practice EBM:
Finding the Evidence
Owen Coxall, Tatjana Petrinic & Nia Wyn Roberts
Bodleian Health Care Libraries
Session objectives
Formulate a focused question
Turn a focused question into a
search
Search TRIP & PubMed
Formulate a focused question
Patient / Problem / Population
Intervention
Comparison
Outcome
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?
Quick search
TRIP
www.tripdatabase.com
PubMed Clinical Queries
www.pubmed.gov
Handson
Formulate a focused question
◦Use your own question or one of the
examples in your pack
◦Record the search terms you’re using
Run a quick search on TRIP
www.tripdatabase.com
Run a quick search on PubMed Clinical
Queries www.pubmed.gov
Run a full search strategy
Why bother?
Too few results
Too many results
Irrelevant results
Submitting a funding proposal
Writing a guideline
Conducting a systematic review
Combine terms with
OR
Smoking OR tobacco – either term can be
present
smoking
tobacco
Combine terms with
AND
Smoking AND cessation – both terms must be
present
smoking
cessation
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”
Develop a search strategy
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
pregnan*
smoking or smoker*
nicotine replacement OR nicotine
patch*
cessation OR stop* OR quit*
1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4
Perform a search on PubMed
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
Handson
Take your focused question:
◦Run further searches on PubMed
Help
Finding the Evidence tutorials:
◦ EBM website – EBM tools – Finding the Evidence
PubMed
◦ Short online tutorials
◦ Quick guides to PubMed – basics, MeSH search and
MyNCBI
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