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DNP Nursing Inquiry Search

Step by step guide to the Nursing Inquiry Assignments

Meet with your Site Coordinator

You NEED to develop your question before you begin searching. Make sure you schedule a meeting with your site coordinator and develop a PICO question with them before beginning developing your search strategy. You should be able to fill out the first page of the Search Strategy Template before you open PubMed or any other database. 

Identify Basic Search Terms

When conducting a systematic review, you have almost always identified a few key papers you know you want your search to retrieve. In this class, you are not necessarily working from a pre-existing systematic review but you can use key papers if you have them.

The value of these papers is twofold. First, these papers provide a rich source to identify search terms to represent the concepts in your research question. Second, they can also be used to evaluate your final strategies to ensure you haven’t missed any important terms.

PubMed is a valuable resource for identifying search terms. Each record for a key paper includes a unique ID (PMID), citation, and often an abstract and author supplied keywords. If the article has been indexed for MEDLINE, it will also have a list of assigned MeSH terms, the controlled vocabulary used in PubMed.

Check each key paper you have in PubMed to start gathering ideas of what you'd like to include in your search concepts.

 

The Literature Review Process

There are eight distinct steps that will assist you in moving through a literature search.

  1. Write down your topic in a way to identify the key concepts and issues that you want to address. You may find it helpful to structure the topic in a PICO format (P = Patient, Population, I = Intervention, C = Comparison or Control, O = Outcomes). Although it is not necessary to use all elements of the PICO in the search strategy, this will help you frame the topic into a translatable framework. Use the PICO worksheet and the Search Building Worksheets below to help keep track of your research concepts and search terms.
  2. Do some background research to see what's already been written about the topic. You may find it helpful to search books and journals through the library catalog, as well as databases that may be relevant to your topic.
  3. Narrow down the topic, if necessary. You may find that the original question is too broad. After you have done the background research, you will have a better idea of what specifically you are interested in.
  4. Decide on the scope and nature of your review. What types of research are you interested in? Are you prepared to do title and abstract screening? What are you hoping to address with your research?
  5. Create and execute your database searches. Searching is an iterative process, so you may need to test and refine before setting on your final search strategy. Your search strategy should use a combination of keywords and controlled vocabulary terms to represent each concept of your research topic. Combine your search concepts using AND, OR, or NOT to refine or broaden your search.
  6. Examine and evaluate your results to make sure that they could potentially answer your research question. This is the point to make changes before proceeding.
  7. Export and screen your results. Using a citation manager will allow you to remove duplicates when you screen. Your informationist can also recommend screening software and strategies. For more information on using a citation manager, see our citation management guide.
  8. Extrapolate the data and evidence to draw conclusions about your research topic.

Are you interested in different types of reviews? See our guidance on performing specific types of literature reviews.