Related Research Guides
- Complementary & Alternative Medicine
- Evidence-Based Medicine
- Occupational TherapyThanks to Laurie Sabol, who graciously offered her guide and its text as a template for this one.
PT in the News
The New York Times' Health section for Physical Therapy has articles with reader responses.
Medscape News covers PT.
Point-of-Care Resources
- ACP PIEROrganized by condition and questions about care, this database from the American College of Physicians continually reviews the evidence and defines the standard of care. It covers physical therapy in its sections on Non-drug Therapy.
- Best PracticeSponsored by the British Journal of Medicine, this database of conditions is updated continually. Its record for a condition includes a summary and definition, etiology, epidemiology, diagnostic steps and tests, and treatment approaches with drugs, guidelines and evidence. It finishes with recommendations and outlook for patient follow-up. It provides links to Clinical Evidence for its systematic reviews.
- DynaMedA reference tool created by physicians for use primarily at the 'point-of-care', DynaMed is updated daily and monitors the content of over 500 medical journals and systematic-review databases. Its references link to some free articles but otherwise to PubMed records. To access the full text of our licensed articles, open another browser window, login to our customized PubMed, and click on the blue icon for Tufts Electronic Holdings. It is also has apps for mobile devices.
- UpToDateIts clinical experts, many on the Tufts faculty, synthesize the current literature into topic reviews, which are peer reviewed and fully referenced. This link works only on the Tufts network, but Tufts Medical Center also has a subscription to the database. Its reviews of many conditions contain some evidence and updated references. It doesn't work with our FindIt@Tufts, so copy the article title into the search box on PubMed@Tufts or into the title search on Ovid Medline and follow the links to our holdings.
Search Tips
These tips may improve the relevance of your search results, no matter which resource you search.
Sample topic: What type of exercise is helpful for pain management in elderly patients with hip replacements?
Increase your results. If your search is so narrowly focused that it returns a small number of results, eliminate a less-important concept.
-
A search on the sample topic (above) might return very few results. Try eliminating management and maybe even pain.
-
Use an asterisk (Tufts catalog requires a double asterisk: **) to retrieve alternate word endings: e.g. therap* would retrieve therapy, therapeutic, therapies, etc..
-
Use synonyms. In the example above, you may retrieve more results by typing (elderly or senior* or very old or old age). Your entire search might look like this: pain* and (elderly or senior* or very old or old age) and (exercis* or physical therapy) and (hip replacement* or total hip arthroplast*).
Reduce your results:
- If a simple search retrieves too much, try adding a population, an intervention or an outcome. Any combination of those factors will increase the relevance and decrease the number of your results.
Use database limits:
-
CINAHL: Scrolling down its main search page you'll see limits for publication date, language, special interest, gender and age group. Select as many as are pertinent to your research question.
-
PsycInfo: Scrolling down its main search page you'll see a long list of limits. Note that you can limit by a specific journal title, a test or measure, age groups and other factors.
Librarian |
 Elizabeth Richardson Links: Profile & Guides |
Loading...
