If you're searching for evidence to help answer a clinical question, PubMed has a search interface specifically to help with this. Clinical Queries enables pre-made filters to find research for different question types (Therapy, Clinical Prediction, Diagnosis, Etiology, and Prognosis). This allows for a quick but focused search strategy. They are useful when conducting evidence-based practice research.
Once you have entered relevant terms from your research question
Select a Study Category from the drop-down menu.
There are two scope filters:
For more information, see available documentation on the:
To access the tool from the PubMed homepage, click on "Clinical Queries" under the Find menu at the bottom of page.
PubMed Clinical Queries contains two types of categories that you can filter by: Clinical Studies and COVID-19.
Scenario
Let's search for clinical studies on education and exercise for patients aged 65 and older who are diagnosed with high blood pressure. To search for clinical studies, type patient education exercise high blood pressure into the search bar.
The Clinical Queries page displays the first five results under the filter area. Click on "See all results in PubMed" to view all the search results and add additional filters.
Clinical Studies Categories
You can adjust your results using the two additional menus under the search box.
The Filter menu has five study categories: Therapy, Clinical Prediction Guides, Diagnosis, Etiology, and Prognosis. We will select the Therapy category because it provides information addressing the treatment of disease.
The Scope menu provides two options: Broad and Narrow. The Broad search will retrieve more results, but some will probably be less relevant. The Narrow, specific search will find more precise, relevant citations but retrieve fewer results. We will select the Narrow search.
For more information, see available documentation on the: