You might be wondering what we mean by an evidence search, or literature search, as it used to (almost always) be described.
In your courses, you will be asked to support your assignments with facts, researches or simply evidence in order to achieve good grades and learning good practices.
We usually offer you a guided or assisted session, to help you learn and demonstrate searching skills as this is part of your assignments. Contact us to know more about it.
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PICO is a tool to help you construct a clinical 'searchable question' . It's a bit like building blocks!
Population/Patient/Problem: How would you describe the patient?
Intervention: What kind of intervention would you want to do?
Comparison: Are there other possible interventions?
Outcome(s) : What would happen by doing your selected intervention?
Try to structure your question around these topics.
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Practice the method:
Follow this step by step guide from the National Library of Medicine to practice the PICO method.
Tips and Advice:
Think about the keywords - the main concepts you're looking for, and think of a few synonyms if you can.
Decide if you'd like to apply limits - do you only want English Language articles? Are you only interested in research published in the past five years, for instance?
Once you've established what you're going to search for, decide what sources you're going to look at, and choose a database or source to start.
Start first by our Knowledge and Library Hub. You can find articles online, books, textbooks.
If you need to access to online articles, don't forget to login with your OpenAthens account! You can do so by clicking on the link at the top of the Search page.
If you find a book that is suitable for your topic, come to the library and ask us for help!
To search specifically for articles, use our tools available on our website.
Another source to find articles bibliographic references is 
. You can search through more than 30 millions references. To get the best out of PubMed here is a guide to it.
Google Scholar is also a good tool to find academic documents. Try it at the bottom of this page.