PubMed

Using PubMed to find evidence-based systematic review articles?

PubMed is a huge database that, along a great deal of original research, also contains evidence-based medicine reviews of medical topics. For many clinical questions, going directly to original research is time consuming and puts the clinician in the position of unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. Systematic review articles like the ones produced by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and other publications can provide comprehensive, authoritative answers to clinical questions (what is a systematic review?). Systematic reviews from many sources (including Cochrane) can be retrieved by using the “Systematic Review” search box within Clinical Queries.

When you enter terms into the search box (e.g. autistic disorder) and click “Go”, PubMed appends a search strategy to your search.  This strategy is intended to retrieve citations identified as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, guidelines, and citations to articles from journals specializing in review studies of value to clinicians.