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Information Resources for Clinical Research, 2 of 5 — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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Information Resources for Clinical Research, 2 of 5

NIH VideoCast · 1,474 words · 7 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of Information Resources for Clinical Research, 2 of 5 by NIH VideoCast on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

>> Tracy Shields: Hi, I'm Tracy Shields. I'm a biomedical librarian at the NIH Library, and in this section of Searching the Literature, we are going to talk about how you frame your research question for the search. We're going to discuss what the PICO framework is and how to use that framework as a tool

for your question in search development, and we're also going to explore some questions that can help you formulate your search strategies and some search helpers you can use as part of your search strategy with your search. So the type of framework may depend on the type of research or subject area you are looking into.

In this section, I'm going to mainly focus on the PICO or PICOTS framework, which is primarily used for clinical and quantitative research areas, but there are other areas of research that you may encounter that have different frameworks, and I've listed a few here on this slide. So you may need to consider and investigate 23 00:01:18,620 --> 00:01:21,250 before your research what type of framework

best reflects the research that you're doing and the type of question you're asking. 26 00:01:28,030 --> 00:01:31,800 So the PICO framework or PICOTS, depending on how you see it,

stands for -- the P stands for patient, population, or problem, the I for intervention. C stands for comparison or control. O stands for the outcomes. And T, you may see, as timing or timeframe. And S as the setting, or occasionally you may see this as the study design. So you can use the PICO framework elements 35 00:01:58,430 --> 00:02:03,680 to kind of think about what your research question is

and some of the things that you need to consider as part of your search. So, for example, with P or a patient, population, problem you may want to think about how is that population described? What's special about that population or patient group? Do the patients' age matter? These are things that you may need to consider

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as part of your search strategy as well. For interventions you can think about what is being done and how what is being done, how can that be described? Are there different ways to think about it? Are there special terms? Are there brand names? If it's a surgical process, is there an eponym or are there certain acronyms you may need to consider,

because even though you may understand those things, there could be multiple ways of describing them and you may need to put that as part of your search in order to be the most comprehensive search possible. For comparison, outcomes, timing, and setting there are other questions you may need to consider, as I note on the screen,

and sometimes you may not even need those as part of your search strategy itself, but it's still helpful to think about, even if you don't use it as part of your search strategy you may be reflecting on these questions when you're looking at your search results to determine if your search worked well

and you're getting the relevant items or as you're looking through them, the things that you want to read later. So let's take an example question. Say you want to look at what non- pharmacological interventions can help patients in a post anesthesia care unit with their nausea and vomiting. Using the PICO as a template,

you can kind of reframe this question to "does the use of non- pharmacological interventions improve nausea and vomiting for adults in a post anesthesia care unit?" Conceptually, it's the same thing but by reframing it in this framework, you can help design your search strategy by looking at the different concepts and coming up with the different search terms

you may need for those concepts. So in the case of the patient population, you're looking at adults, there's not many variations of ways to describe adults, but it could be something you need to consider in your search, especially if you want to exclude certain age groups. With nonpharmacological there could be many ways

you might want to describe this, as non-pharmacological with certain spellings, with and without a hyphen, thinking of it as an alternative, complementary medicine, or even non-drug based interventions. For nausea and vomiting there could be some slight variations in terms to consider, but other areas in this case for question, post-operative, could be described in many different ways.

Again, you may need to consider with or without a hyphen, but also post-surgical or after surgery as a phrase. In the post anesthesia care unit, there can be acronyms such as PACU, or it could be referred to as a recovery room, and again thinking about with or without a hyphen, but also variations in spelling.

So after you kind of come up with some of these search terms you need to think about some of your search helpers, in particular something called Boolean Operators, which are "and," "or," and "not." These are going to be helpful in your search because "and" will find the overlap and combine your concepts together.

"Or" is what you use for synonyms to expand your search. "Not" is something that's very powerful and you probably should use with caution, but it's something to keep in that toolbox with your search because it could be very useful depending on your topic area. Some other things to consider for search helpers are the special characters

that you may use as part of your search. Parentheses are good to group terms together by concept so going back to kind of thinking about the PICO, for nausea or vomiting, you would want to keep that group together, in post-operative or after surgery you would want to keep that together, so you could use parentheses to keep that grouped.

Then there's also quotations that you might use for phrases, again, to keep terms together. And then there's an asterisk that you can use for truncation, and that will help you so you don't have to think of all the variations of a term. For example vomit, vomited, vomiting -- you can use truncation to capture all of those things in one term.

And depending on the database, you may have other special characters, as noted here in the slide that can be used for truncation and some databases even allow for truncation in different parts of the word. And as I mentioned before, you may want to consider with or without a hyphen or using spaces instead of a hyphen,

possibly in combination with quotation marks, along with other special characters that could be part of the search syntax in the database itself. And that could be brackets it could be quotation marks, and it could be straight versus curly quotation marks. Some other considerations when thinking about your search, as I mentioned before, are some spelling variations.

This could mean variations in British versus American spelling. You may want to also consider filters and limitations, such as the language you're doing, the year it might be published, and you can make these as part of your search strategy or it could be a filter or limit that you could do within the database itself.

And then of course, your best search helper is probably going to be a librarian because we're the searching experts that can help you formulate your question, teach you how to search or even do the search for you. So going back to our question, using the PICO framework, we can see how our search terms that we came up,

along with the search helpers such as parentheses and using Boolean Operators and truncation and hyphens can then be used to formulate search terms and group them together by concept. They can then be converted into a search strategy that you can use in the databases of your choice. So you can put it all together in the PICO framework

to show a search strategy that you can then use later on wherever you design your search. So in summary, you can use the PICO framework as it's one of many that can help you with developing your research question and formulating your search. Thinking about your concept, whether it's the search terms, synonyms, variations, will help you develop the search itself

and you can use those search helpers like Boolean Operators and the special characters in your search strategy to keep it all together. So some questions you may want to consider as you move forward is what framework fits your research question. In this case, we mainly focused on the PICO framework, but there are other ones you may want to consider.

And how can you use the framework to develop your search strategy?

Thank you for listening.