Excerpt from Evidence-Based Practice Workbook, 2nd ed. by Paul Glasziou, Chris Del Mar and Janet Salisbury. Blackwell, 2007.
Convert information needs into focused questions:
*Adapted from UIC University Library's Evidence Based Medicine research guide.
PICO is an acronym for
PICO is used to create a researchable question based on a clinical situation you have encountered. Based on your PICO question, you will identify keywords and/or subject terms to use in database searches.
You can use PICO to develop your clinical question.
P - Patient or population/disease: Which population are you studying? (Consider age, gender, ethnicity, group with a certain disorder, etc.)
I - Intervention, prognostic factor, or exposure: What do you want to do for the patient? (Consider therapy, exposure to a disease, risk behavior, prognostic factor, preventative measure, or diagnostic test)
C - Comparison or control: Are you comparing two interventions or variables? (Consider absence of disease, absence of risk factor, or use of placebo)
O - Outcome: What is the expected result or what do you hope to accomplish, improve or affect? (Consider disease incidence, accuracy of a diagnosis, rate of occurrence of adverse outcome, survival or mortality rates)What is the expected result or what do you hope to accomplish, improve or affect? (Consider disease incidence, accuracy of a diagnosis, rate of occurrence of adverse outcome, survival or mortality rates)
Consider the level of evidence you need. You can search for specific types of evidence or study designs such as randomized controlled trials or systematic reviews.
Source: “EBM Pyramid.” Digital Image. Eli M. Oboler Library, 27 May 2016.
Systematic review
Uses explicit, rigorous methods to identify, critically appraise, and synthesize relevant studies
Meta analysis
A quantitative method of combining the results of independent studies and synthesizing summaries and conclusions which may be used to evaluate therapeutic effectiveness.
Critically Appraised Topic
A summary of the current best evidence on a topic, generally by topic experts. Critically appraised topics (CAT's) usually include evidence from more than one study, but are more brief and their methods less rigorous than systematic reviews.
Critically Appraised Individual Article (a.k.a. Critically Appraised Paper)
A summary of a single paper, generally by a topic expert.
Randomized controlled trial
A clinical trial that involves at least one test treatment and one control treatment, concurrent enrollment and follow up of the test- and control-treated groups, and in which the treatments to be administered are selected by a random process
Cohort study
Study in which subsets of a defined population are identified.
Case control trial
Study which start with the identification of persons with a disease of interest and a control group without the disease. The relationship of an attribute to the disease is examined by comparing diseased and non-diseased persons with regard to the frequency or levels of the attribute in each group.
Clinical trial
Pre-planned studies of the safety, efficacy or optimum dosage schedule of one or more diagnostic, therapeutic or prophylactic drugs, devices or techniques, selected according to predetermined criteria of eligibility and observed for predefined evidence of favorable and unfavorable effects.
Use PICO to formulate your search strategy. Select terms used to develop your clinical question using PICO. Begin by searching the patient problem and intervention. For this example, the patient problem is diabetes, and the intervention is nutrition counseling. Enter both terms in CINAHL or another Nursing/Allied Health Database search box. Combine your terms using the Boolean operator AND. Using AND to combine terms tells the database to look for both terms in the title and abstract of the resources indexed in a database.
CINAHL Complete is is the WWCC's premier research tool
for Nursing & Allied Health journals and one of the definitive tools
you will likely find yourself using for the rest of your academic career and professional career.
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When reading an article, report, or other summary of a research study, there are two principle questions to keep in mind:
1. Is this relevant to my patient or the problem?
2. Is the evidence in this study valid?
For a checklist that can help you evaluate a research article or report, use our checklist for Critically Evaluating a Research Article
Remember to Use APA!
These OWL resources will help you learn how to use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation and format style. Authoritative resources on in-text citation and the References page, as well as APA sample papers, slide presentations, and the APA classroom poster.