Evidence-Based Neonatology Subject Guide

Critical Appraisal Tools and Worksheets

Practicing Physicians must be able to search the medical literature, appraise and assimilate scientific evidence, and assess and improve their patient care practices. Neonatology fellows are expected to:

• Address clinical questions they may have encountered during clinical practice.
• Perform PubMed searches and select relevant study that answers their clinical question.
• Evaluate the hypothesis, the study design, the method, and the results of the relevant study as well as information on the diagnostic and therapeutic effectiveness.
• Determine the clinical applicability of the selected study in their clinical practices.

• PubMed may add a number of synonyms, spelling variations, MeSH etc. Check the History and Search Details to see how PubMed translated your search terms. Did it interpret your search how you wanted?
• Use only “essential” terms. PubMed's simple search box may look the same as Google's, but PubMed is constructed very differently with a sophisticated search engine. It includes a database of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and automatic term mapping to optimize retrieval. When conducting your search, identify key concepts, use nouns or MeSH terms with the Boolean search concepts AND, OR, or NOT connecting them. Putting too many words or full sentences will only muddle your search results. PubMed is not Google!
• Use PubMed Additional Filters to refine your search results to recent publications, English language, and Article types, e.g., Clinical trial, Randomized Controlled Trial, Observational study, etc.
• Don’t use the Free Full-text or Full-text  filter with PubMed. Very few articles are available free of charge for download. Most peer-reviewed journals require annual subscriptions. The Full-Text filter option may cause you to miss relevant results from resources that the UCI Libraries own or those that could be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
• Avoid using acronyms or other abbreviations as search terms. PubMed is often able to discern the meaning of SOME acronyms and abbreviations, e.g., NICU = Neonatal Intensive Care Units. However, some common abbreviations are NOT recognized by PubMed, e.g., NEC, UTI, AOM, etc.
• Do not include “placebo” OR “no treatment” in the search strategy.Avoid using imprecise search words. Some words you might try as search terms may be used inconsistently in published articles or are too imprecise to be useful, e.g., increased, better, greater, less, worse, etc.
• Avoid using imprecision search words. Some words you might try as search terms may be used inconsistently in published articles or are too imprecise to be useful, e.g., increased, better, greater, less, worse, vs, etc.
• Display Options – Summary or Abstract.   Sorted by Best match is set as the default display.  Select Sorted by Publication Date or Most Recent.
• Cite – Allow you to o copy or download a single citation in a specific style format.
• Similar articles – if you find too few results, the abstract page of a citation provides a pre-calculated set of additional PubMed citations closely related to that article.