Example : “Tell me all you know about elderly taxi drivers in Mongolia who have heart attacks while drinking decaffeinated coffee on Friday nights after the bars close and whether prescribing aspirin might help reduce the risk of further heart attacks.”
Break the topic down into individual concepts with P-I-C-O.
P – Patient Population or Problem = Heart Attacks in the Elderly
I – Intervention = Aspirin
C – Comparison = Nothing
O – Outcome = Prevention of future heart attacks
P-I-C-O helps you pick out the important concepts while leaving out some of the extraneous stuff.
The P-I-C-O model helps define and refine a search topic, whether you are searching a powerful database like Medline/PubMed or just Google.
Your Librarians, Michele Matucheski (at MMC) and Margo Lambert (at STE) are available to do the research for you. Just let us know what you’re looking for.
