It is important to plan a search strategy before beginning your research. This guide will help you decide what you want to find and will save you time in the future. For Evidence Based Practice (EBP) searches you will be expected to break down your question into its key concepts using a formula such as PIO: Population; Intervention (or issue); Outcome
This section of the guide will cover:
The following video will give you an overview of the PIO search formula and how to apply it using an example research question.
Video Written guidance
The following videos explain how each of the operators work in more detail.
Boolean Operators - OR Boolean Operators - AND Written guidance
Once you have decided on all of your search terms and structured your PIO search you need to input them into the databases to find the relevant research. The databases for your subject can be found on your Subject LibGuides. The following instructions refer to EBSCO branded databases.
These are identifiable by this logo
Early Years, Early Childhood Studies and Education students - your EBSCO databases are listed here
The following video will demonstrate how to input your terms using boolean operators to maximize the accuracy of your results.
Video Written guidance
Viewing your results
Once you have found some useful items, the next step is opening them to read the full text. The following video tutorial below shows you how to do this.
Video Written guidance
You can open any of our databases and search without having to create a personal account. To use some of the more advanced features of our EBSCO resources you need to create a personal account in order to:
The username and password you create is personal to you. If you forget your password you will need to Reset it.
Video Written guidance
The following video (or written guidance) shows you how to save your search results so you can return to them later. They both mention a database named CINAHL but the same processes work for many of our databases.
Video Written guidance
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