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.
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Evidence-based medicine 1
Why search? 2
How do you keep up to date 4
Further reading 5
Chapter 2 Where to start 6
The hierarchy of evidence 6
The hierarchy of searching 7
1. How much time do I have? 8
2. What type of publication am I looking for? 10
3. Is my query about a specific topic? 13
Chapter 3 Clinical information: sources 15
Medical libraries 15
The Internet 15
Chapter 4 Searching the Internet 26
Search engines and directories 26
Evaluating material found on the World Wide Web 29
Saving useful websites 35
Chapter 5 Formulating searchable questions 37
Types of question 37
Breaking down the clinical scenario 38
Identifying keywords 39
Further reading 39
Chapter 6 Building a search strategy 41
Identifying synonyms 41
Synonym sources 42
Truncation and wildcards 42
Combining terms (using Boolean operators) 46
Construction of the final search strategy 47
Chapter 7 Free text and thesaurus searching 50
Free text searching 50
Thesaurus searching 51
Chapter 8 Searching healthcare databases 55
Finding the evidence: key steps 55
Medline 57
PubMed 57
Ovid Medline 64
CINAHL 68
Cochrane Library 73
Further reading 80
Chapter 9 Refining search results 81
Limits 81
Methodological filters 85
Clinical Queries 86
Sensitivity versus specificity 87
Systematic reviews 89
Further reading 90
Chapter 10 Saving citations 93
Logbooks 93
Reference management software 94
Chapter 11 Citation pearl searching 98
Related items 98
Author search 99
Keywords 99
Journals 100
Snowballing 100
Alerts 101
RSS feeds 101
Chapter 12 Quality improvement and value: sources 102
Examples of quality improvement and value questions 102
Current awareness 102
Searching for evidence on quality improvement and value 103
Other useful sources of information 105
Networks 113
Further reading 114
Chapter 13 Patient information: sources 115
Shared decision-making 115
Poor quality health information 116
Good quality health information 116
Appraising online consumer health information 117
Trusted information sources 118
Rarer conditions 120
Third-party assistance 121
Patient decision aids 121
Writing patient information 122
Keeping up to date with patient information 122
Further reading 123
Chapter 14 Critical appraisal 124
Definition 124
Critical appraisal checklists 124
Further reading 125
Chapter 15 Glossary of terms 126
Appendix 1 Ten tips for effective searching 135
Appendix 2 Teaching resources 138
Record your favourite resources 142
Index 143
