Another fine MeSH: clinical medicine meets information science

Introduction: evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires clinicians to tackle patient management by making more systematic use of databases like MEDLINE and using more sophisticated search strategies, to optimise the retrieval of relevant papers. Aim: to collect empirical data on genuine requests for information and search strategies. Methods: collection of literature search requests for staff using computerised biomedical databases at the libraries in district general hospitals, teaching hospitals and a research unit; the ‘intervention’ of introducing a common structured form explicitly asking about the patient/intervention/outcome/comparison axis; comparison of the structured and unstructured forms for completion of these four components; coding of the requests, using a modified Scott Richardson classification. Results: the structured form promotes the use of components from the EBM anatomy and increases the total number of these in each search. Conclusion: building prompts, like an EBM anatomy, into request forms improves the precision of literature searching without impairing recall. For clinical problems, rather than educational environments, the Scott Richardson classification needs modification.