NURS 7230: Biostatistics and Epidemiology for the Doctor of Nursing Practice

Searching for evidence-based medicine/nursing articles using CLINICAL QUERIES in the PubMed database

Clinical Queries within PubMed is designed for people who are looking for those few good articles that might help someone make an informed decision. It is designed for the busy working professional in the medical field.  This is the database that is available in most hospitals and clinics for working professionals.

PubMed is on the open web for anyone to use it, however to get links to the maximum number of FREE full text articles you should access PubMed from the Otterbein library home page.

Choose Clinical Queries listed on the left side and drill down to SYSTEMATIC REVIEWS: In PubMed, Systematic Reviews cover a broad set of articles including: meta-analysis, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences and guidelines.

Capitalize the Boolean operator’s AND/OR/NOT between your keywords

Cancer AND smoking 

Depression OR Sadness AND women OR female

Abdominal pain NOT ectopic

Hand washing AND infection control

Carbonated beverages AND childhood obesity

Autism AND Vaccines

For more specification in your search there are also FILTERS within the Clinical Queries:

• THERAPY- will retrieve the studies that discuss the treatments of diseases
• DIAGNOSIS- will find studies that discuss disease diagnosis
• ETIOLOGY – will find studies that discuss the causation/harm in disease and diagnostics
• PROGNOSIS – will find studies that discuss disease prognosis
• CLINICAL PREDICTION GUIDES: will find studies that discuss methods for predicting the likelihood of disease presence or absence.
•  LIMIT your search in other ways too: by date range, by language, Just Nursing Journals, etc… 

Use SPECIFIC subject terms like Myocardial Infarction not “heart attack”

Spell terms out don’t use acronyms like “COPD”

Limit the years or the search will search the entire database back to 1950.

PubMed comprises over 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.

PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Click on the canned searches below. In PubMed, you can modify these search strategies by focusing on a specific demographic or geographical location

PubMed indexes articles using  controlled vocabulry, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The search engine uses automatic term mapping to to map your search to the appropriate MeSH term.  You can see the MeSH terms for an article in Abstract view. To start searching, just enter your search terms in the basic search box.  You can check how your search was mapped in the "Details" box on the right dashboard in the result set. Advanced search and MeSH search options are also available.