Rowland Medical Library services the medical, nursing, and dental schools of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
MC Students are allowed to visit and use materials from the Rowland Medical Library. They only need to present their MC ID for identification. All resources must be used at the library's physical location on the second and third floors of the Learning Resources Center.
Relevant databases for Evidence-Based Medicine are listed under Selecting Resources and denoted by UMC Resources.
Rowland Medical Library is located at 2500 N State St. Jackson, MS 39216. For directions to the Learning Resources Center, click here.
PubMed is the world's largest biomedical/life sciences database. Browse the below links for tips, tricks, and tutorials for searching PubMed and uses MeSh.
Now that you have formulated a specific and relevant clinical question, your focus will shift to finding the best evidence in the medical literature to answer your inquiry. There is TONS of medical literature available today, therefore a large portion of the acquire phase is creating an effective search strategy and learning how to access resources that can maximize efficiency.
When you create a PICO question, you are actually thinking about how discrete topics relate to each other. Each component: your P, your I, your C, and your O, comprises a portion of your search strategy, or what you will input into the database. You can utilize only your PICO components to execute a simple search, but each component will probably have different ways of being expressed when an author writes about them - i.e. synonyms. When you use databases or search engines, they only retrieve what you type in, nothing more and nothing related. It is up to you to think of how an author might express your topic/concepts in their writing in order to expand the possibility of catching all relevant articles.
It's helpful to create a chart to stay organized. Place your PICO components at the top of a column, then write possible synonyms in the row(s) below.
In infants, what is the effect of premature birth compared to full-term birth on sensory deafness over the lifespan?
| P: infant | I: premature | C: full-term | O: sensory deafness |
|---|---|---|---|
|
infants baby babies newborn |
pre-mature perterm per-term preemie |
fullterm 39 weeks 40 weeks |
sensorial deafness hearing loss deafness |
BUILDING A SEARCH STRING
Now that you have created your synonym chart, you need to know a little bit about how databases and search engines work in order to ensure you create a search string that retrieves the types of results you want.
Once you have formulated a search strategy you will need to select a resource (or resources) to search. To quickly find answers, you would usually first search filtered (pre-appraised) resources, beginning at the top of the evidence hierarchy, moving lower down the hierarchy is required. If pre-appraised information is not available you will need to search unfiltered resources such as PubMed.
This resources list aims to provide you with access or access information to EBM resources available to you through Speed Library, University Medical Center, and the internet.
Resources are listed according to the hierarchy of evidence:
Meta-Search Engines simultaneously search multiple evidence-based resources.
Filtered resources appraise the quality of studies and often make recommendations for practice.
Authors of critically-appraised topics evaluate and synthesize multiple research studies.
Evidence is not always available from filtered resources and searching primary literature is sometimes required. It is possible to use filters within these databases to identify studies appropriate to the clinical question.