DH 5403 Discipline of Dental Hygiene

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:

1. Creating a research question
2. Searching the literature
3. 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.

Mendeley is a freely available citation manager that will help you organize your citations and PDFs.