How to search for evidence to answer clinical questions: pragmatic guidance for healthcare professionals and biomedical researchers

Healthcare professionals, such as medical doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists commit to lifelong learning and to provide evidence-based healthcare. Despite this, surveys have found that medical doctors’ ability to find, analyse, and interpret scientific evidence is poor, which severely impairs the ability to stay updated. Thus, healthcare professionals should have basic competences to find relevant, updated biomedical evidence in the shape of systematic reviews and randomised clinical trials. Simple, pragmatic searches can be valuable to identify such evidence. In this paper, we provide a simple 4-step guidance on how to find systematic reviews and randomised clinical trials from commonly used databases and search engines like PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar. We highlight the World Health Organization International Clinical Trial Registry Platform to find planned and ongoing clinical trials and PROSPERO to find planned and ongoing systematic reviews. We give some background knowledge on each resource and tips to successful searches. Our guidance is intended as an evidence-based, pragmatic overview for healthcare professionals and researchers who would like to quickly answer specific questions to make a clinical decision, such as choosing between different treatments, or in the context of research purposes to find evidence on a certain topic. It is not intended as guidance for exhaustive searches needed for conducting systematic reviews.