When looking up existing literature on a particular topic, it is important to formulate a clear research question. A widely used method in the medical world is the PICO method. This means you formulate your question in such a way that all important parts are included, and allows you to easily investigate the efficiency of one intervention or compare two interventions with each other. PICO consists of the following parts:
P - Population, Patient Group, or Problem you are interested in. Think of important characteristics (e.g. a certain age group), or a specific problem (e.g. dementia)
I - Intervention, which you want to investigate. Think of what should be done with the patient (e.g. therapy, surgery, medication)
C - Control, or Comparison, i.e. the alternative you want to investigate (e.g. placebo, different type of therapy, no medication)
O - Outcome. Think of what the intervention should work against (e.g., certain complication)
Imagine: you are doing an internship in a nursing home. Many of the elder people who live there have dementia. You see that they have trouble brushing their teeth regularly, and as a result they get bad teeth. You are curious whether it is known in the literature what would be more effective in keeping the teeth healthy: if the nurses help the patients with brushing their teeth or if the patients would do this independently.
The corresponding PICO is:
P - elderly people with dementia
I - receiving help brushing their teeth
C - independently brushing of their teeth
O - healthy teeth
On the next page, we'll continue with this example and look for keywords.
Here are some interesting links and other Library Guides for you to check out. The PubMed Library Guide is currently only available in Dutch