Environmental and Occupational Health

According to the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM), well-formed clinical questions are essential in practicing EBM. "To benefit patients and clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients' problems and phrased in ways that direct your search to relevant and precise answers." - CEBM, University of Toronto.

The PICO model is a tool that can help you formulate a good clinical question. Sometimes it's referred to as PICO-T, containing an optional 5th factor. 

For more information visit PICO: Cochrane Library Tutorial. 

Boolean Searches

• AND: searches for all of the search terms.  Using *and* in between search terms will narrow your search.  For example
  • women and prohibition  
• OR: searches for at least one of the search terms.  Using *or* in between search terms will broaden your search. For example: 
  • women or female 
  • prohibition or temperance 
• NOT: excludes the search term immediately after the NOT operator.  Therefore, use "not" in front of a term to ensure that the search will not include that term. For example: 
  • alcohol not drugs 
• Phrase searches
  • Please quotation marks (“ “) around the words that you want to be search together as a phrase. For example:
    • "Eighteenth Amendment" 
    • "Women's Christian Temperance Movement" 
• Wildcard searches
  • The use of the asterisk (*) is a wildcard that most databases all you to use to search a root word and variable endings to broaden search results.  For example: 
    • latin* (retrieves "latin," "latins," "latino," "latinos," "latina," "latinas")

Keywords vs Subject Searching

Keywords

• Your topic itself may prove to be the words that may up your search term(s). 
• Keywords searches look for that search term(s) in the title, subject, author, summary or abstract fields.
• Keywords will also be searched for repetition in the document.  Keywords found frequently or throughout an article may push that article higher in the search results.
• Keywords matches to dot distinguish between context and purpose.  It may match the correct word but not in the 

Subject Searching 

• A subject search will locate materials by Library of Congress Subject Headings, which is a controlled vocabulary or standard list of subject terms. The University Library assigns Library of Congress Subject Headings to all items listed in the online catalog.
• The number of results may vary widely.  Some searches will retrieve hundreds of results but if you choose a nonexistent subject term while others get nothing.  
• If you do not know the appropriate subject heading for your topic, conduct a keyword search first and look at the subject heading(s) for relevant items.