PIO searching for education students

This guide is specifically aimed at education students. It covers:

• Planning your search
• Using Boolean operators
• Searching the databases
• Creating and managing an account on the EBSCO databases 

Planning your search

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:   

Example question - Is mainstream education beneficial for autistic children?

P (population) – Autistic children / Children with autism spectrum disorders

I (intervention or issue) – mainstream education

O (outcome) - beneficial

In the top row of a table write each of your keywords according to the PIO formula.   Below each keyword make a list of alternative keywords or phrases that describe that concept.  Think also about plurals, alternative spellings or US terms (e.g. color, colour) etc.

What are Boolean operators?

When you search for information, you can link your keywords together with Boolean operators. The main ones which are used in searching are: OR, AND and NOT.  

OR

OR is used in a search to broaden out the results. When you combine your keywords with OR, you will get more results, as you are saying any of the keywords can be found.

It's important to think about all the ways an author could have described a topic, in order to make sure all of the possible useful research articles come back in your search.  So once you've identified the main keywords you can use OR to search for them all. 

In literature searching, this helps with sensitivity, as it shows you are trying to find all of the relevant research for your topic.

For example: handwashing OR hand hygiene / teenager OR adolescent

AND

You can use AND in a search to reduce the number of results you get. It should make the results more specific to your research topic as it ensures the results which come back contain all of keywords you have listed. 

In literature searching this helps with specificity as it shows you have conducted a focussed search.

For example: handwashing AND hospital infection / teenager AND smoking

In advanced literature searching, you would first broaden out your search with OR, and then narrow it down using AND.

For example: (Handwashing OR hand hygiene) AND (hospital infection OR inpatient infection)

NOT

Using NOT in a search will exclude results from your search and will give you less results.

For example: hospital acquired infection NOT community acquired infection

Be careful when using NOT, as it might exclude something which you are actually interested in (if the keyword or phrase that you have excluded is also mentioned in research which includes the keywords that you would like to come back). 

The short video below explains how to search with the Boolean operators using some example topics.

Putting it all together - searching the databases

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 Guides. 

Creating a personal account

You can open and search a database without having to create a personal account but you need to create a personal account in order to:

• save searches (which you can re-run later).
• save articles/research papers.
• create folders/projects, so you can organise your saved articles.

EBSCOhost

The video and written guidance below explain how to create a personal account within EBSCOhost. This will enable you to save and re-run searches in a range of databases, including Education Research Complete, CINAHL and Medline. 

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Deed.