Finding High Level Evidence in PubMed Presented by Erin O’Toole

Objectives Become familiar with: The types of higher level evidence publications Why you would want to use PubMed The content of PubMed MeSH = Medical Subject Headings Two ways to search for higher level evidence

Levels of Evidence Systematic Reviews/ Meta-analyses of RCTs Randomized Controlled Trials = RCTs Individual RCTs Mechanism- based Reasoning LEVEL 1 LEVEL 2 Adapted from "The Oxford Levels of Evidence 2". Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. LEVEL 5

Why Use PubMed?  Not all systematic reviews are published in EBM resources.  It’s FREE! You won’t be at UT Southwestern forever. Loansome Doc service  Produced by National Library of Medicine

What’s in PubMed?  MEDLINE – index and abstract of 5600 biomedical journals index = citation and MeSH for article abstract = summary of article  Books and book chapters from NCBI Books  Articles from PubMed Central Over 22 MILLION article records in PubMed!

Beware the Basic Search Ratio of systematic reviews to case reports?

PubMed Tool: Clinical Queries  Includes search limited to systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other high-level evidence But wait...  Limited to specific clinical research areas Not all topics covered No economic analyses Comprehensive search has to be done directly in PubMed

Search with MeSH Medical Subject Headings “Tags” assigned to articles to describe their content 16 categories of terms, general to specific Automatically EXPLODES your search

A live demonstration of searching for high level evidence in PubMed occurred at this point in the presentation.

References Heneghan, Carl, and Douglas Badenoch. Evidenced-Based Medicine Toolkit, 2 nd ed., Maiden, Mass.: BMJ Books/Blackwell Pub., OCEBM Levels of Evidence Working Group. "The Oxford Levels of Evidence 2". Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. QUESTIONS? Erin O’Toole