PubMed search
Finding the Evidence
Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) is s patient-centered approach to treatment decisions, which provides personalized dental care based on current scientific knowledge, patient preferences, and your professional expertise.
Evidence Pyramid displays the quality of evidence according to the study type. The highest quality of evidence is at the top with filtered, synthesized resources such as guidelines, systematic reviews, or meta-analyses.
Literature Review Process
This class will introduce you to the process of completing a literature review. The information on this page will guide you to resoruces on:
- Creating a research question
- Searching the literature
- Organizing the literature and managing citations
Creating a Research Quesiton
The PICO framework can help you identify the important components of your research question
- P (population, problem, patient)
- I (intervention)
- C (comparison -- note: you may not have one)
- O (outcome)
Hint: Try search for journal articles with your P, I, C components from your PICO one at a time in a database. Then read through the results for the O in the conclusion or results section of the articles.
Searching the Literature
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PubMedSearches MEDLINE, which is the primary source of journal articles for the health sciences (fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, health care systems, and basic sciences). Coverage is from the 1940s to the present.
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Ovid MEDLINESearches MEDLINE, which is the primary source of journal articles for the health sciences (fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, health care systems, and basic sciences). Ovid MEDLINE is optimized for advanced literature searches. Coverage is from the 1940s to the present.
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CINAHL (Nursing & Allied Health)Covers nursing and allied health journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations, as well as providing summarized evidence-based resources such as care sheets and quick lessons.
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ScopusSearch for information from scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Covers the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
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Google Scholar (Setup connection to get to PDFs)Use Google Scholar to find articles from academic publishers, professional societies, research institutes, and scholarly repositories from colleges and universities. If you are using from off-campus access, change the "Library Settings" to University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Look for the "FindIt@U of M Twin Cities" links in your Google Scholar search results to access full text and PDFs.
Organizing Your Citations
Mendeley is a freely available citation manager that will help you organize your citations and PDFs.