Contact your subject librarian for more help:
The first step in EBM is to ask a well-built, patient-oriented question. Formatting your research question as a PICO question is a great way to accomplish this.
P - Patients or Population:
Who are the relevant patients?
I - Intervention(s) or Exposure(s):
For example, diagnostic tests, foods, drugs, surgical procedures, time, or risk factors. What are the management strategies we are interested in comparing or the potentially harmful exposures about which we are concerned?
C - Comparator:
For issues of therapy, prevention, or harm, there will always be both an experimental intervention or putative harmful exposure and a control, alternative, or comparison intervention or state to which it is compared.
O - Outcome:
What are the patient-relevant consequences of the exposures in which we are interested? We may also be interested in the consequences to society, including cost or resource use. It may also be important to specify the period of interest.
Framing Clinical Questions: PICO. In: Guyatt G, Rennie D, Meade MO, Cook DJ. eds. Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill; Accessed April 30, 2021.
The following worksheets provide additional approaches to writing PICO questions.
In addition to clarifying the population, intervention or exposure, and outcome, it is productive to label the nature of the question that you are asking. There are 5 fundamental types of clinical questions:
Therapy: determining the effect of interventions on patient-important outcomes (symptoms, function, morbidity, mortality, and costs)
Harm: ascertaining the effects of potentially harmful agents (including therapies from the first type of question) on patient-important outcomes
Differential diagnosis: in patients with a particular clinical presentation, establishing the frequency of the underlying disorders
Diagnosis: establishing the power of a test to differentiate between those with and without a target condition or disease
Prognosis: estimating a patient's future course
Clarifying Your Question. In: Guyatt G, Rennie D, Meade MO, Cook DJ. eds. Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill; Accessed April 30, 2021.