Getting Started
Keywords
In the first week of class, you started to think about your Clinical Practice Question and PICO(T) for the Evidence-Based Research Project. Elements of the PICO(T) will help you decide on what keywords to use when searching in the library databases and open web resources that you learned about in the previous sections. It is not an ideal strategy to just type your question into the databases or search engines, so take a second to break down your question into its component parts.
Example:
In the Intensive Care Unit (P), how does structured visitation (I) compared to an open visitation policy (C) affect patient safety and nursing, familial, and patient satisfaction (O) during their hospital stay (T)?
Keywords: visitation policy, hospital, patient safety, patient satisfaction, intensive care
Not all the terms of your PICO(T) question need to be used at once in a single search. Often, it's helpful to start out broadly with just a few terms, and then add more to narrow down your results. Trying to start off with everything often ends up with a limited number of initial search results, or possibly even no search results.
Also keep in mind that there can be many ways to describe the same thing. When using your PICO(T) question to think of keywords, also think of synonyms and related terms that you can potentially use.
Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria
If you are ever asked to record inclusion and exclusion criteria for a research assignment, then remember that inclusion criteria mean everything that must be present in an article to make it eligible for inclusion as part of your research. Exclusion criteria are the elements in an article that disqualify it from being included as part of your search.
They sound very similar to the search limits, but they are not the exact same. Search limits are the specific limits that you set using the available filtering options in a database or search engine, like peer-reviewed search results only, the publication date range, full-text articles only, etc.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria are criteria that you personally decide on and set before you begin to search. They will often overlap with search limits – for example, you can choose to exclude any articles that are older than five years, and you can also easily limit your search results in a database to only articles that were published in the last five years.
Trial-By-Error Process
When beginning research on a new topic, always remember that database searching, more than anything else, is essentially a trial-by-error process through which you try different combinations of search terms to explore the published scholarly literature. You may need to try several different term combinations before you start finding articles relevant to a research topic. You also might end up discovering that there’s a literature gap on your topic, and that you may need to change it accordingly.
It might feel a little frustrating at times, so don’t forget that you can always reach out to your Sacred Heart librarians for assistance at stage step in the search process.
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