This “big picture” question does not directly tie-in to the assignment outcomes, but it may help you to understand why the assignment looks the way it does and why it is an important excercise for students of public health.
These resources are intended to help with part one of the assignment. Your question should have a PICO(T) format and it should have a scope that is relevant to current research priorities in the field of public health.
Part two of the assignment: Once you have identified your PICO(T) concepts, you should search database lists of controled vocabulary terms for relevant terms to include in your query. In PubMed, the controlled vocabulary is called "MeSH." The tutorial linked below provides an overview.
More on part two of the assignment: PubMed is the staple database for all health-related research; if your research involves health outcomes, start with PubMed. You should include other databases in your research according to the concepts that are involved in your research question. For the assignment, check the list of databases at the link below and identify the two that are the most relevant to your research question. Do not make a judgement based on the description alone: try searching with your research question's keywords or query to find which databases give you the most hits.
Part three of the assignment requires that you develop a Boolean query in the following format:
("population term 1" OR "population term 2") AND ("intervention term 1" OR "intervention term 2")
The above example is just a rough guideline of the structure. Copied directly, it will be inadequate for most research questions. For the purposes of this assignment, you may include a group of outcome terms and you may use more than two variations of population and intervention terms.
The advantage of a hand-coded Boolean query is that it can be copied and pasted into most databases while retaining basically the same function.
More rigorous systematic reviews use queries that are very "sensitive;" that is, the query retrieves a high number of records- sometimes thousands. The point of a systematic review is to evaluate ALL of the records that are returned by your search, a process that takes roughly 1-2 minutes/record for an efficient evaluator.
Given the time constraints of this assignment, you are asked to develop a query that is more "precise;" that is, it returns a smaller number of results, but a higher percentage of the results is relevant to the research question. Tune your query to retrieve between 75 and 200 results (but please do not make arbitrary choices about how you limit your results- your query should be a logical development of your research question) Prepare to spend about 2 hours methodically reviewing those results. (See: "How can you document your search criteria?" below.)
The tutorial linked below will provide an introduction to the use of the basic search operators and Boolean logic that are needed to complete this assignment.
The methods of a systematic review should be specific and reproducible. Your query documents how you automated retrieval from databases. Your inclusion and exclusion criteria document how you decide whether or not the results of that automated retrieval are relevant or not. The PDF linked below, taken from an actual systematic review, illustrates the type of considerations that may be used to determine whether to include or exclude published studies. This is a particularly detailed and well-organized example of how search criteria may be presented. Keep this example in mind when approaching Part 4 of the assignment.
Skills with citation management software can make a valuable contribution team-based research. You may also find value in developing a personal onlne library of publications that relate to your research interests.
The tutorial linked below illustrates how you can use Zotero to collect citation information online.
Part six of the assignment requires you to publish, in AMA format, a bibliography of all of the articles that met your criteria. This could easily be 20-30 articles and would be quite a time-consuming task for a person not using citation managment software; however, if you have collected your sources in a citation manager, publishing a bibliography takes only a few minutes. The link below explains how to publish bibliographies using Zotero.
Part seven of the assignment requires that you cite your sources using AMA style. Citing sources in AMA style can be a complicated thing to do manually. Citation management software can help you to insert and correctly format in-text citations and lists of works cited. Follow the link below, titled "Zotero word processor integration," for an explanation of how to use Zotero with MS Word to format your in-text citations and publish lists of works cited.