PICOTT is a mnemonic used to describe elements of a good clinical foreground question to be directly relevant to the patient or problem at hand. The PICOTT model is used in evidence-based practice to assist in formulation of the search strategy by identifying the key concepts that need to be in the article that can answer the question..
PICO or PICOTT:
PATIENT OR PROBLEM
How would you describe a group of patients similar to yours? What are the most important characteristics of the patient?
INTERVENTION, EXPOSURE, PROGNOSTIC FACTOR
What main intervention are you considering? What do you want to do with this patient?
COMPARISON
What is the main alternative being considered, if any?
OUTCOME
What are you trying to accomplish, measure, improve or affect?
Type of Question
Therapy / Diagnosis / Harm / Prognosis / Prevention
Type of Study
Systematic review / RCT / cohort study / case control
Limiters: Most databases will allow you to filter your results using facets, (sometimes called limiters or refiners. These are the options (normally located on the left side) that allow you to only display results that meet certain criteria such as peer review, full text, year of publication, etc. Using limiters can really help to cut down the number of results you get from a search.
Reference Scanning: When you find an article you like, look at the bibliography listed at the end of the article. There is a good chance that you'll find other articles that would be helpful to your research.
Identify Alternate Keywords or Subjects: Often databases will list the keywords or subject headings that are associated with the article you find. You can sometimes find this information in the abstract of the article as well.
Use appropriately professional terms; Avoid acronyms; Don’t use too many search terms: more terms = fewer results;
Boolean Operators: Use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) can sometimes be useful to help tie together or separate search terms. Use AND to only find articles that contain both of the keywords you're looking for, use OR to search for articles that use either one, and use NOT to eliminate a search term from your search.
Truncation and Wildcards: Using the Asterisk * after a search term tells the database to look for several variations of words. For example child* will search for Child, Children, Childhood. Wom* will search for women, woman... some databases use the ! exclamation point for the wildcard symbol.
Keyword Searching
|
Subject Searching |
|
| Language | Natural language (YOUR language) | Pre-defined "controlled" vocabulary (database language) |
| Familiarity/ease of use | Familiar & easy to use: a great way to start your research | Not always intuitive: pre-defined terms are used to describe ideas, concepts, objects, activities, classes of people, academic subjects, etc. |
| How searches work | Searches for keywords anywhere in the record: keywords are not necessarily connected in a meaningful way resulting in sources that may not be relevant | Searches for specific pre-defined terms only in the subject heading or descriptor field, limiting your results to the most relevant sources |
| Flexibility | Very flexible: can combine together in many ways | Less flexible: need to know the exact controlled vocabulary term |
| Number of results | Often yields too many or too few results | Due to its precision, it will typically give you far fewer results than a keyword search |
| Relevance | It May yield many irrelevant results | results are usually very relevant to the topic |
Try out the Boolean Machine.
Advanced Searching with Boolean operators
Using the power of "Boolean operators" in your search enriches the quality of the information you find. For example, adding "AND" allows you to narrow your search to find results with more than one search term in them. Using "OR" will broaden your search to find results with any of the search terms used. Adding "NOT" to a search removes an unwanted word from all of your results. Really advanced searches can incorporate more than one Boolean operator to make search results very specific and pertinent to your research.
community AND immigrant AND irish = The search engine will find results using ALL THREE terms
community OR subgroup OR demographics = using OR with synonyms increases the variety in your results; search results will include ANY of the terms
columbus NOT explorers = using NOT will exclude a term; this is often useful to avoid a commonly used term that is irrelevant to your research
(columbus NOT explorers) AND (women OR gender) = use parentheses to "control" mini-searches, then connect the mini-searches with AND to make a sophisticated advanced search
Wildcard Symbol: Using the asterisk (*) after part of a search term looks for several variations of the word. For example, autobiograph* will find autobiography, autobiographies, or autobiographical. (Some databases use the ! exclamation point for the wildcard symbol. Check out the help section of any library resource for a list of acceptable symbols.)
Synonyms can very helpful throughout your investigative and research process. Using synonyms with boolean operators can potentially expand your search. Databases with subject headings or controlled vocabularies like MeSH in PubMed often have a thesaurus that can match you with appropriate terms.
| Elderly | Geriatrics, Aged |
| Heart Attack | Myocardial Infarction |
Boolean operators allow you to manipulate your search.
Use AND to narrow your search
eg. elderly AND diabetes
Use OR to broaden your search
eg. myocardial infarction OR heart attack
Use NOT to exclude terms from your search
eg. children NOT infants
Use quotation marks to search for phrases. When you surround your search terms with quotation marks, you are telling the database that the words must appear as an exact phrase. Searching for the terms with no quotation marks gives us results that contain synonyms and MeSH terms.