PubMed's Clinical Queries search tool is designed to allow healthcare providers in the clinical setting to connect to that portion of the PubMed literature which will be most beneficial in practicing in an evidence based manner and for making clinical decisions. Searches in Clinical Queries, through the use of expertly crafted filters, produce results in the following areas: "Clinical Study Categories" (etiology, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, and clinical predication guides), "Systematic Reviews" and "Medical Genetics". The steps for conducting a search in PubMed Clinical Queries are listed below.
1) On the PubMed homepage, underneath the PubMed Tools heading, click on the Clinical Queries hyperlink.
2) On the Clinical Queries page, enter search terms into the search box (located at the top of the page), and then hit the search button. For this example, we'll search for articles on the etiology of Mesothelioma.
3) You now have results to look at under the three headings of "Clinical Study Categories", "Systematic Reviews" and "Medical Genetics". We will now look at applying more focus to our search for clinical studies on the etiology of Mesothelioma. To do this:
4) This search still leaves us with an unwieldy number of results. In order to apply filters to narrow the results, click on the "See all" (see image above) link to view all of the results in a standard PubMed search results page.
5) In the standard PubMed interface, notice that in the search box, the Clinical Queries etiology filter is reflected by the text (Etiology/Narrow[filter]). To limit this search, additional search terms could be added; however, for this example, we'll just add filters. To do this, click on the filters (located on the left side of the search results page) you would like to implement. After you set the limits, you will see the ones that are in effect just above the search results. In this case, you can see that the filters published in the last 5 years, Humans have narrowed down the results to a total of 158. At this point, you might either choose to select a couple of the articles for further study or reconfigure your search and run it again.
For additional information from the National Library of Medicine regarding PubMed Clinical Queries, click here.
