Literature Search Strategy

Running head: SEARCH STRATEGY
Search strategy
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1SEARCH STRATEGY
LITERATURE SEARCH STRATEGY
PICO question:
To conduct literature review on a topic, the first step is to develop a clear and
researchable research question. The PICO framework is a common framework that helps to
initiate a literature search as it helps to develop a question that identifies the four concept of
population, intervention, comparison and outcomes (Milner & Cosme, 2017). The PICO question
for literature search is as follows:
In patients suspected with spinal injury (P), are rigid cervical collars (I) more effective than soft
collars (C) in the prevention of paralysis occurring due to spinal injury (O)?
The following are each elements of the PICO question:
Population (P): patients with a suspected cervical injury (SCI)
Intervention (I): rigid cervical collars
Comparison: Soft cervical collar
O- Prevention of paralysis
T-randomised controlled trial (RCT)
Search strategy:
To get access to high quality and relevant research literature on the impact or rigid
cervical collars compared to soft cervical collars in prevention of paralysis in patients with SCI,
databases like CINAHL and PuBMed was reviewed. The key words that were used for searching

2SEARCH STRATEGY
included ‘rigid cervical collars’, ‘Soft cervical collar’, ‘paralysis’, ‘suspected cervical injury’ and
‘randomised controlled trial’. To ensure getting high number of relevant papers that has all
concepts related to the research question, the keywords were combined with Boolean operators
like ‘AND’ and ‘OR’. The following table shows how different keywords were combined with
Boolean operators:
Concept Synonym Syntax
Population: Adults with
suspected cervical injury
Cervical injury, suspects of
cervical injury, suspected
cervical injury
‘cervical injury’ OR suspected
cervical injury’
Intervention: Rigid cervical
collar
Rigid collar Rigid collar OR rigid cervical
collar
Comparator: Soft cervical
collar
Soft collar Soft collar OR soft cervical
collar
Outcome: prevention of
paralysis
Paralysis, rate of paralysis,
paralysis outcome
Paralysis outcome or rate of
paralysis
Type: Randomized controlled
trial
RCT RCT OR randomized study
Other ways of combining the search topic included the following:
Rigid cervical collar AND soft cervical collar in SCI patient
Rigid cervical collar AND soft cervical collar in patient with SCI
Rigid collar AND paralysis
Soft collar and paralysis in SCI

3SEARCH STRATEGY
Inclusion and exclusion criteria:
After using the search terms and keywords, limits were applied during the search process
by development of several inclusion and exclusion criteria. This criterion was useful in screening
the articles and deciding the elements that should be present in each research papers. The
inclusion and exclusion criteria were as follows:
 Only papers published in English should be included and rest should be excluded
 All research papers must be published within 2010 to 2020
 Only those papers were taken which used randomized controlled trial as a research
design. Studies which had other research designs were excluded
 Only those papers were taken which had rigid collar as an intervention
 The research population for all the selected papers should be adult patients with SCI
 All research papers must measure the outcome of paralysis in SCI patients.
In addition to the above criteria, some additional exclusion criteria included removal of
studies with animals and those done in people below 18 years.
The overall summary of the search process was summarized in PRISMA table. After entering
the search terms and different combination, total number of articles retrieved was 120 papers.
The papers were further reviewed by looking at title and abstract and identifying duplicate
papers. At this stage, 10 papers were excluded as they were duplicates and the rest 45 were
excluded as they did not match with the research question. The rest 65 papers were screened
based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. 55 papers were excluded because of the following
reason:
 The study did not compared rigid collar versus soft collar