Searching for Evidence-Based Oncology
This is a write-up from a medical librarain over at Moffit about using Pubmed to find primary papers about oncology. Not bad, but few folks, atleast in the community setting use PubMed. Would rather use predigested NCCN or Uptodate. But still a useful skill to have……
Clinical Reasoning in Oncology Searching for Evidence-Based Oncology
Introduction : Evidence-based medicine is defined in the medical subject headings (MeSH) from the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) as “the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions. Evidence-based medicine asks questions, finds and appraises the relevant data, and harnesses that information for everyday clinical practice.” [1] Finding relevant clinical articles involves the use of specific search strategies as quality filters to limit retrieval to clinically relevant studies.Finding the best evidence to answer a clinical question in the medical literature can be a daunting task, especially for a busy clinician. However, general search skills and techniques to find evidence-based literature are applicable to evidence-based oncology searching as well.To find appropriate evidencebased information, clinicians need specific skills, named SAS (searchanalyze-store) skills. [2] This paper examines these search skills by outlining basic evidence-based search strategies, citing possible databases to use for oncology information, and noting specific oncology-related subject headings to use in searching biomedical databases. Specifically, skill with MEDLINE searches using such strategic resources as MeSH terminology, exploded subject headings, and Boolean search techniques are addressed. This review does not address the analysis and storage of search results.The use of evidence-based search terms supplies an extra filter and allows the retrieval of quality information, thus producing a more focused retrieval of articles while saving time for the clinician. Combining two or more subject search terms often results in a large number of citations to review. For example, a general search on breast neoplasms and adjuvant chemotherapy retrieves almost 3,000 MEDLINE citations in PubMed. Limiting search results to those articles that not only are the most relevant for specific patients, but also document clinical outcomes is the purpose of using evidence-based search strategies.
Searching for Evidence-Based Oncology