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Nursing Resource Guide

This is the guide that you will be using for your Nursing courses here at SUNY Delhi. Here you will find information on specific courses, general information about searching for and using library resources.

What is a PICO question?

The first step in your evidence-based research plan is to write a PICO question. PICO is a framework for formulating clinical questions in a researchable way. The letters stand for:

P Population - Individual or group that you are researching
I Intervention - what is the action (intervention/treatment) that you are considering taking?
C Comparison - what other action (intervention, treatment) are you comparing to the action?
O Outcome - what do you anticipate as the outcome?

Take a look at the example on this page to see how to translate a PICO question into database search terms, then try your search terms in the different evidence-based search tools. 

Translating PICO to database search

How do you translate a PICO question into a database search? Let's look at an example:

For individuals with a family history of cancer what effect does the timing of routine cancer screening examinations have on early diagnosis of cancer compared with individuals who do not have an identified family history of cancer?

Population: Individuals with a family history of cancer.
Intervention: Scheduling of routine cancer screening exams.
Comparison: None
Outcome: Early detection of cancer

It's important to pick out the key words from your PICO outline and use those in your search. 

  •  In the phrase, "Individuals with a family history of cancer" the key words are family history cancer
  • In "Scheduling of routine cancer screening exams" the key words are routine screening.  You may also want to search screening OR exam, since those words have similar meaning. You can leave out the word "cancer" since it already appears in your search in family history cancer
  • In "Early detection of cancer" the key words are early detection. Again, you can leave out "cancer" because it's already part of your search. You may want to put "early detection" in quotation marks in the search box, which will search that exact phrase (those two words together, rather than "early" and "detection" by themselves).

How you enter these words in the search box(es) will depend on the database. Trip has an easy PICO search where you can enter your P,I,C, and O in separate search boxes, and you can do something similar in CINAHL+MEDLINE's advanced search. In PubMed, it's best to enter all your terms on the same line.