Getting Started with Practice Sets

The Practice Sets were developed from published, open access systematic reviews. Basically, we found systematic reviews that were openly accessible, extracted the list of included studies, and built activities around them.

The selected systematic reviews are not intended to be considered "gold standard" systematic reviews (or evidence syntheses). We make no judgement as to the methodological quality or the quality of the reported searches in any of the reviews referenced on the site. These reviews simply provide us with a topic and a set of articles (i.e., the included studies) to test our searches against. 

How to Use Practice Sets

Using a Practice Set only takes a few steps:

  1. Identify a Practice Set you would like to work with 
  2. View or download the Topic file
  3. Use the topic and the three highly relevant citations to develop a search strategy in PubMed or Ovid MEDLINE
  4. Test your search against the three highly relevant citations 
  5. Modify your search based on your results (i.e., are you capturing all three highly relevant articles or not?)
  6. When you're happy with your search, view or download the relevant Key file, which is located next to the Topic file. 
  7. Test your search against ALL of the included citations from the published review.
  8. Does your search capture all the studies? If so, you did it! If not, modify your search and try again! This is strikingly similar to how we do it in real-life, except we don't know the final set of included articles in advance. 

Want to see how it all works? Check out these videos!