Dental trauma: an evidence-based approach to care.

Background: One of the key aspects of improving the dental care we offer to our patients is in basing our practice on the best available evidence.

Aim: The main purpose of this paper is to present some basic ways of searching reliable papers on Internet and to introduce some techniques to facilitate the development of strategic search skill to improve the quality of dental care, using dental trauma as an example.

Materials And Methods: After formulation of a clinical question on a dental trauma issue, a comparison was made between: data collected in PubMed using a given term; data collected in PubMed using the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary (Mesh) and data collected using the principles of evidence-based research, all by an independent researcher.