Public Health

Planning your research saves you time.

There are two steps you can take to plan your research before actually going to a database that will

• save you time and
• help you figure out what you should be typing into that database's search bar.

Step one - the clinical question:

State your research idea as a clinical question, which should be specific and answerable:

example: How effective is the use of mouth guards in reducing mild traumatic brain injury incidence in high school athletes?

Step two - PICO:

Check that your question is indeed a "clinical question" by checking to see that it contains three or four specific variables known as PICO:

• a Population/Problem,
• an Intervention,
• a Comparison (not always necessary),
• and an Outcome

here is the same clinical question in PICO format:

You will notice that the Population box above has two variables with an all-caps AND connecting them. This is a Boolean command phrase, and will tell the database that both terms are required.

Step three: turn your PICO into a database search phrase

Charting your question as a PICO gives you pieces of the search phrase you need to search on a database. All you need to do now is combine the pieces correctly, using Boolean commands AND, OR, and NOT