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Evidence Search

(NICE) National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
Search evidence on health, drugs and technologies, public health, social care, and healthcare management , from UK sources, including the British National Formulary, Clinical Knowledge Summaries, SIGN, the Cochrane Library and Royal Colleges, Social Care Online and GOV.UK.
Clinical Trial Information
This database, from the National Library of Medicine, allows you to search for clinical trials around the world with options to search via condition/disease, intervention, and optional terms.
Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making; Includes over 7,500 Systematic Reviews.
TRIP database
As a medical database, a smart, fast tool to find high quality clinical research evidence.

Evidence Information

The Community Guide (CPSTF)
From USA.gov, a collection of evidence-based findings of the Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF). It is a resource to help you select interventions to improve health and prevent disease in your state, community, community organization, business, healthcare organization, or school.
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The CPSTF makes evidence-based recommendations about the
effectiveness and economics of public health programs, services,
and other interventions used in real-world settings—such as
communities, worksites, schools, faith-based organizations,
military bases, public health clinics and departments, and
integrated healthcare systems.

Search Strategies

CINAHL with Full Text This link opens in a new window
To limit your subject search results by research study types, in the Search Options section in the Basic or Advanced search, find the “Publication Type” limit, and select the desired type of study, such as Clinical Trial, Randomized Controlled Trial or Systematic Review. Hold down the “Ctrl” key to select more than one publication type. Once you have selected the desired publication types, click Search.

For study types that are not listed in the “Publication Type” limit box, search using the word "study" or "trial" as one of your keywords.
PubMed This link opens in a new window
To limit your subject search results by research study types, on the left margin of your search results, under Article Types, click the type of study you want to find. If the type of study you want is not displayed, click "additional filters" at the bottom, and choose from the resulting list all the study types you would like to display, then click "Show", and the selected study types will display in the left margin.

Click each type of study you would like included in your in your results, holding down the Control key to select more than one type. Note: "Clinical Trial" will include all individual phases of clinical trials, and will also include Randomized Controlled Trials.

For study types that are not listed as Article Types, like "cohort studies" or "longitudinal studies," search these as keywords and use the AND operator to combine with your topic search results.

Research Organization Chart

Research Organization Chart
Use this spreadsheet to track search terms and meaningfully organize research articles to aid in clinical decision-making.

Levels of evidence

Evidence hierarchies can help you strategically identify which resources to use for finding evidence, as well as which search results are most likely to be "best".

The image is taken from the book, Essentials of Evidence-Based Nursing Practice, p.23 (2018). It shows that the strongest evidence at the top, is systematic reviews, "because the strongest evidence comes from careful syntheses of multiple studies (23)."

Infographic for Scientific Evidence

A Rough Guide to Types of Scientific Evidence
This guide from Compound Interest succinctly captures both the hierarchy of biomedical research along with a description of each type of study.

If you've got a citation

If you already have a citation, the title of journal, it's ISSN, or would prefer to browse journals by a particular subject, follow the steps below:

Click on the Journals tab from the library search bar
Choose from the following options in the drop-down menu to the left of the search box: Title begins with, title equals, title contains all words, or ISSN equals.
Enter all or part of the journal title and then select the SEARCH button. Make sure that you are entering the title of the journal, not the title of the article itself.
Locate the correct title from the results list.
Select the title with the dates that you need and choose the database name next to your preferred dates.
You will be redirected to another screen where you can search for your article.
If the journal or date you want is not available, order the article through interlibrary loan using the link below.

Interlibrary Loan (ILLiad)
Borrow from other libraries with our interlibrary loan system. *Articles & book chapters will be sent electronically and books will be available at the front desk unless you request to have them mailed to you.*