Formulating your question
One of the most important steps in doing a MEDLINE search, is analyzing your question or topic.MEDLINE includes over 15 million citations. A very small number will be relevant to your information needs. Think about your topic and formulate a specific question that will provide you with relevant information.
Break your topic into important elements often described as
the PICO model
- P - the patient group or problem (disease or condition or action)
- I - the intervention (therapy, test) being considered
- C - the comparison (if any), and
- O - the outcome of interest
Search each concept in a separate search statement.
For this tutorial, we will focus on a clinical question using the following case as our example.
The clinical case:
The patient is a 6 month old child newly diagnosed with sickle cell disease. He is currently taking penicillin daily as a prophylaxis against pneumococcal infections. His physician suggests that this might be a long term therapy for the child. His parents are worried about possible adverse side effects of long term use of penicillin, including developing a resistance to the drug. They ask if there has been any research or evidence to show that long term prophylactic use of penicillin is absolutely necessary to prevent infections.
Formulating the question:
Click on the group of key concepts (Set A or Set B) that would be most relevant to this topic?
| Set A: | Set B: |
| child, sickle cell disease penicillin |
sickle cell disease prophylactic penicillin prevention of infections |
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