Practicing evidence-based medicine (EBM) means finding and evaluating the best current research and combining it with clinical expertise to make treatment decisions. An evidence-based literature search always begins with a clinical question. Each of the four main types of questions has a particular search strategy that will retrieve the best results. Watch the Library’s tutorials to see a demonstration of how to do a simple search in Ovid MEDLINE for each of the four main clinical question types:
In addition to MEDLINE, nurses and allied health professionals may want to do evidence-based searches in CINAHL Plus with Full Text, which offers some special limiters to help them retrieve the best results. An EBM search in CINAHL Library tutorial is also available for these limiters.