Sensitive Versus Specific Search Strategy to Answer Clinical Questions.

Background: Students and clinicians are challenged to locate evidence to answer clinical questions. Searching experiences include frustration with words to query databases, lack of searching skills, lack of confidence in nursing databases, and questioning how many databases to search. To implement practice change based on best available evidence, search strategies need to be efficient and effective.

Method: We replicated the systematic review by Stillwell, Vermeesch, and Scott, which used a specific search, with a sensitive search to compare search strategies to answer the clinical question.

Results: The specific search produced 5,108 articles, with eight being relevant; whereas the sensitive search produced 11,362 articles with nine being relevant.

Conclusion: The sensitive search located the same eight studies and one additional study. If PubMed instead of MEDLINE had been used in the specific search, the results would have been identical. [J Nurs Educ. 2020;59(1):22-25.].