Evidence Based Practice

Constructing a well-built clinical question can lead directly to a well-built search strategy. This section addresses how to use a clinical question to develop a literature search. In the literature search, we select terms to use in a database such as CINAHL, PubMed, or the Cochrane Library. Medical databases do not accept queries in the form of full sentences or questions, so key terms must be used instead.

The first step is to select terms that might work best in a database search. In the following clinical question, terms that might be effective in a database search are indicated with green boxes.

Click question to enlarge.

When constructing a clinical question:

• You may not need to use all the words derived from the PICO strategy.
• Exclude terms like "study" and "therapy" that are likely to be too broad and used in hundreds of thousands if not millions of research articles.
• Characteristics such as gender and age may be applied later in the search, after an initial review of results is made, to determine if those characteristics affect the studies and narrow your pool of relevant research.