Health care practitioners engage in what is called evidence-based practice, or the use of empirical evidence from the primary research literature to make decisions about patient care. However, not all research is created equal, and medical experts look to the pyramid of evidence, or hierarchy of evidence, to help them determine the quality of the information and its application to their patients.
Learn more using the link below.
Once you have done some preliminary research using secondary sources and have fine-tuned your research question, it's time to explore the primary literature. In the sciences, primary sources typically report on original research studies and take the form of scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals (they are also sometimes referred to as "papers").
Use the box below to explore different places to locate primary sources.
It's important when searching the medical literature to formulate specific, answerable clinical or research questions. The PICO mnemonic can be a useful way to break your topic into searchable components:
P = Patient (population or problem): Who or what are you studying?
I = Intervention: What is the diagnostic test, treatment or therapy? Or what are the prognostic factors or exposures?
C = Comparison: What are you measuring this intervention against?
O = Outcome(s): What are you trying to accomplish, measure, improve or effect?
Once you have your PICO question, you can break down each concept into a search strategy. For example:
high-risk pregnancy (aspirin OR progesterone) premature birth