PICO Question Resources
PICO is a technique that you can use to formulate and refine your research question. PICO stands for (P)Patient, population, or problem, (I) Intervention or exposure, (C) Comparison, and (O) Outcome. To use PICO, answer questions about each of these elements.
The recommended databases to use are the databases that have the controlled vocabulary: MEDLINE (MeSh 2024), CINAHL Ultimate (CINAHL headings), ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health (Thesaurus), Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (Subjects) or APA PsychoInfo ( Subjects). Any database outside of this list requires approval from the course instructor.
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A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchersMay 2, 2017 by Katie Moon and Deborah Blackman
Citations - Including APA 7th edition
Getting started with a PICO question
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Develop Your TopicTo develop a PICO question, you need to first think of a topic you would like to research. The Develop Your Topic module from the Health Sciences Research Hub on the Learning Portal has some great tips on getting started. This link also includes templates to help you build your PICO question.
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7 Steps to the Perfect PICO Score: Evidence-Based Nursing PracticeSearching for high quality clinical research evidence can be a daunting task to many in the healthcare arena, yet it is an integral part of the evidence-based practice process. Depending on your role in the clinical environment – librarian, nurse or student nurse – you may possess some of the skills needed, but not all. For example: librarians are well-versed in conducting literature reviews but may be unfamiliar with using the PICO framework to facilitate their literature search. Staff nurses generally understand the key concepts of evidencebased practice but might lack basic literature searching skills. Student nurses learn about the importance of evidence-based practice in nursing school; however, until they become practicing nurses, they might not fully understand the correlation between evidence-based interventions and improved patient outcomes.
Search Strategy / PRISMA
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Creating a PRISMA flow diagram: PRISMA 2020The aim of the PRISMA Statement is to help authors improve the reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. We have focused on randomized trials, but PRISMA can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions. PRISMA may also be useful for critical appraisal of published systematic reviews, although it is not a quality assessment instrument to gauge the quality of a systematic review.
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Searching the Literature in Health Part 2: How to search: The basics (YouTube video)Analyzing your health topic, using Boolean searches, truncation and wildcards, creating a search table.
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PRISMA Flow Diagram - Interactive ToolSystematic reviews should be described in a high degree of methodological detail. The PRISMA Statement calls for a high level of reporting detail in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. An integral part of the methodological description of a review is a flow diagram.
This tool allows you to produce a flow diagram for your own review that conforms to the PRISMA2020 Statement. You can provide the numbers in the data entry section of the 'Create flow diagram' tab.
Databases
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APA PsycArticles® This link opens in a new window
Full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology from APA, CPA and others. Full-text subset of PsycInfo.
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APA PsycInfo® This link opens in a new window
Core Psychology database. Includes international material selected from around 2,500 journals as well as books and dissertations.
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CINAHL Ultimate This link opens in a new window
More than 900+ full text journals for nursing and allied health research, providing full text for more of the most used journals in the CINAHL index than any other database. Subjects covered include nursing, allied health, biomedicine, alternative medicine, and consumer health. Also includes Evidence-Based Care Sheets.
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Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition This link opens in a new window
Scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition also features the AHFS Consumer Medication Information, which covers 1,300 generic drug patient education sheets with more than 4,700 brand names.
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LWW Nursing Journals @ Ovid This link opens in a new window
Search 117 fulltext nursing eJournals on the Ovid platform. A select number of eBooks are also available including Handbook of Nursing Diagnosis, Lippincott Visual Nursing, and Nursing 2022 Drug Handbook.
View helpful external search tools for this database on the OVID website.
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MEDLINE This link opens in a new window
Provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities to search citations from over 5,400 current biomedical journals.
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Nursing & Allied Health Premium This link opens in a new window
Provides users with high-quality healthcare information covering nursing, allied health, alternative and complementary medicine, and much more. Includes 350+ videos.
