Searching Skills Toolkit: Finding the Evidence

Searching Skills Toolkit is an expert guide to help you find the clinical evidence you need more easily and effectively. Clearly presented with useful tips and advice, flow charts, diagrams and real–life clinical scenarios, it shows the best methods for finding quality evidence. From deciding where to start, to building a search strategy, refining results and critical appraisal, it is a step–by–step guide to the process of finding healthcare evidence, and is designed for use by all health and social care professionals. This second edition has been expanded with new chapters on searching for sources to support evidence–based management decision making and how to better enable your patients to make informed choices. It has also been fully updated to include new web sources, open source reference management software, and new training resources and exercises. Searching Skills Toolkit is an ideal reference for doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, managers and decision makers, researchers and students.

1. Introduction Evidence–based medicine Why search? Keeping up to date 2. Where to start Hierarchy of evidence Hierarchy of searching How much time do I have? What type of publication am I looking for? Is my query about a specific topic? 3. Clinical information: sources Medical libraries The Internet Clinical search engines National guidelines International guidelines Sources containing secondary evidence Online databases Grey literature Professional organisations Networks and colleagues 4. Searching the Internet Search engines and directories Basic searching Advanced searching Tutorials Evaluating material found on the World Wide Web Other good quality Internet sources of information Saving useful websites 5. Formulating clinical questions Types of question Breaking down the clinical scenario Identifying keywords Synonym sources 6. Building a search strategy Identifying synonyms Synonym sources Truncation and wildcards Combining terms (using Boolean Operators) Construction of the final search strategy Refining search strategies (also known as limiting) 7. Free text and thesaurus Free text Thesaurus searching 8. Searching healthcare databases Medline PubMed (incl. Clinical Queries) Medline OVID CINAHL Cochrane Library 9. Refining search results Limits Methodological filters Clinical Queries Sensitivity versus specificity Systematic reviews 10. Saving citations Logbooks Reference management software Mendeley Cite while you write 11. Citation pearl searching Related items Author search Keywords Journals Snowballing Alerts RSS feeds 12. Quality improvement and value: sources Examples of quality improvement and value questions Current awareness Searching for evidence on quality improvement and value Other useful sources of information Networks 13. Patient information: sources Shared decision–making Poor quality health information Issues with finding good quality health information Appraising online consumer health information Trusted information sources Rarer conditions Third–party assistance Patient decision aids Writing patient information Keeping up–to–date with patient information 14. Critical appraisal Definition Critical appraisal checklists 15. Glossary of terms Appendix 1: Ten tips for effective searching Appendix 2: Teaching resources Index

Caroline De Brún, Clinical Support Librarian, University College London, UK Nicola Pearce–Smith, Information Scientist, Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Oxford, UK