Where to search:
- PubMed This link opens in a new window
Indexes journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. Contains material not yet indexed in Medline.
- CINAHL with full text This link opens in a new window
Provides bibliographic data and some full text for scholarly literature in nursing and allied health professions.
- Health Research Premium Collection This link opens in a new window
Indexes journals, evidence-based resources, and dissertations covering medicine.
- Gale OneFile Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine This link opens in a new window
Pprovides access to academic journals and magazines covering the fields of physical therapy, physical fitness, and sports medicine.
- Sports Medicine & Education Index This link opens in a new window
Indexes and provides some full-text to academic and trade articles on physical education and sports medicine including dance, sport law, kinesiology, motor learning, recreation, standardized fitness tests, sports equipment, business and marketing, coaching and training, sport sociology/psychology, health education and physical therapy.
- Web of science. Core collection This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed works in 254 disciplines. Includes links to references, citations, and related works and has extensive author profiles.
Searching with PICO
Once we know our PICO question, we can start to look for evidence in the databases.
Conveniently, PICO breaks up our question into searchable concepts. We can use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to combine concepts together for our search.
For our current research question, our search may look like: Athletes AND chocolate milk AND recovery
Note: While we know from PICOTT that we are asking a therapy question, and looking for an RCT (or a well conducted systematic review) these are not useful search terms because they are not always indexed with the articles in the databases.
However, knowing our target type of question and type of study can help us narrow down our results after we run a search. The search in PubMed below turned up quite a few promising articles, but we will have to take a closer look to decide if they will effectively answer our question. PICOTT can help us with this.
Notice the highlighted text on the search results above. You can quickly scan the abstracts and titles of the articles in your search results to look for terms that may indicate study type. Here, we can see one systematic review and two possible RCTs based on the language in the article abstracts and titles. These will be good articles to start with as we start assessing our results.
