Search for Evidence: Determining the Best Keywords and Databases

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Student’s Name
Institution

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Determining the Best Keywords and other Terms to Use for Searching Databases
My search question: Among postoperative total hip replacement (THR) patients, does
physical therapy and comprehensive self-management education compared to the normal
discharge education only significantly reduce chronic pain and improve physical functioning?
The keywords that I used in searching for the evidence are: physical therapy, education,
discharge education, and post-operative total hip replacement. The keywords were identified
from the PICO components of the search question (Cullen et al., 2017). The synonym that was
identified was hip arthroplasty, which was used alongside the other keywords associated with
search question to search the databases. The key words and the synonym were sufficient enough
and enabled me enhance my search in relation to the search question. According to Dang &
Dearholt, (2017), the PICO components as identified were as follows:
P-Postoperative total hip replacement patients
I-Physical therapy and comprehensive education
C-Normal discharge education
O-Reduction of chronic pain and improvement of physical functioning
Identifying the Best Databases for Search
I looked for the best databases that could help me find considerable evidence of the
search question. The databases that I searched include, The Cochrane Library, PubMed, and
google scholar. The choice of using the Cochrane Library was based on the fact that the library is
recognized internationally as the gold standard in evidence-based health care (Dang & Dearholt,
2017). Additionally, I selected PubMed because of the availability of many research journals on
life sciences and biomedical research articles. Pub Med also contains Clinical Queries that have
pre-built evidence-based filters (Fetters & Tilson, 2012). These filters were useful in finding

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information that was relevant to my search question and which enabled me to be more exact in
my search. Finally, I used Google scholar because of the ease of use. Google scholar also enables
a broad search across many disciplines and scholarly articles such as books, journals, and theses
(Dang & Dearholt, 2017). Due to its multidisciplinary approach, I had to narrow down and be
precise in my research by including the word “nursing” to my search.
Deciding the Best Strategies for Searching, Including Exclusions, and Operating
Delimiters
According to Howlett, Rogo and Shelton (2013) phrases derived from the PICO
components can be used for searching. Therefore, the best strategy that I employed for searching
was the use of phrases that were appropriate to the search question. In my search, I did not use
all the words in the PICO information. I excluded such terms as “normal” and “hip replacement”.
Instead, I used the phrase “hip arthroplasty” the synonym of hip replacement in my search. I also
excluded the term “knee” which seemed to appear in every of my searchers and the exclusion
enabled me to be very precise on my search question of hip replacement. Barker, Linsley & Kane
(2016) explains that the Boolean operators include ‘AND’, ‘OR ‘and ‘NOT’. I used all the
Boolean operators in my search.
To develop the best strategies for searching, I did not use all the four PICO elements at
once because all the four elements did not produce any results at all. Instead, I used two or three
PICO elements which proved to retrieve considerable amount and specific results. The PICO
elements that I mostly employed included the ‘population’, the ‘intervention, and the
‘comparison’. However, exclusion of the ‘comparison’ element of the PICO components did not
lead to any significant change in the search results. An example of the search strategy that I used
include phrases and operating delimiters such as “physical therapy” OR “comprehensive