One of the multiple ways available for searching PubMed is via the PubMed Clinical Queries search interface which offers three ways to filter your resulting citations. Search results are grouped as follows: 1) Clinical Study Categories, 2) Systematic Reviews, and 3) Medical Genetics.
The Clinical Study Categories option is meant to be used by busy clinicians in order to assist them with retrieving clinically relevant, methodologically sound studies that they can use to inform their clinical decision-making. The five categories (or methodological study types) available include: 1) Etiology, 2) Diagnosis, 3) Therapy (which is the default selection), 4) Prognosis, and 5) Clinical prediction guides. Users can also filter their results by scope: a search strategy can be limited to either a broader, more sensitive search that will return a larger number of results or to a narrower, more specific search that will return fewer results that are more precise. These Clinical Study Categories search filters or “canned searches” are based on the research of Dr. RB Haynes and his bioinformatics colleagues from McMaster University in Canada, and have been updated and re-validated over the years. Continue reading
