Practitioner's Guide to Using Research for Evidence-Informed Practice. Allen Rubin

TABLE 2.2 Web Search Example Using the Term EMDR at http://Google.com

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing - Wikipedia, the… http://en.wikipedia.org/…/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessin…

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy that was developed by Francine Shapiro to resolve the development of…

EMDR: Taking a Closer Look: Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=emdr-taking-a-closer… Jan 3, 2008 - Can moving your eyes back and forth help to ease anxiety?

EMDR Institute, Inc. http://www.emdr.com Offers therapy. Provides a history of the approach, including a discussion of the Adaptive Processing Model. Also includes references and contact information.

EMDR International Association http://www.emdria.org

The EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) is a professional association… eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) - The… http://www.skepdic.com/emdr.html May 16, 2011 - Discusses the usefulness of eye movement in treatments. Focuses on studies and research data.

      Note: Search performed using Google on October 14, 2011.

2.2.1 Some Useful Websites

      You should look for websites that provide objective reviews. Two highly regarded sources of rigorous, objective reviews can be found at the websites of the Cochrane Collaboration and the Campbell Collaboration. Both of these sibling collaborations recruit groups of experts to conduct each review. The reviews provided by the Cochrane Collaboration focus on health and healthcare interventions broadly, including caregiving, workforce, mental health, and substance abuse treatment, and can be accessed at www.cochrane.org. In addition to its reviews, that site provides links to critical appraisals of the reviews, bibliographies of studies, and other information, including information to help readers appraise the quality of its review system.

      The Campbell Collaboration reviews focus on social welfare, education, and criminal justice. You can access its website at www.campbellcollaboration.org. Even though the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations are maintained separately, they do include overlapping areas of research. For example, reviews of mental health-relevant research can be found in both libraries of systematic reviews.

      Another other highly regarded source is the American Psychological Association's website (http://www.apa.org/divisions/div12/rev_est) on empirically supported treatments.

      Government sites can be another good option. One such site, for example, is the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress (www.ncptsd.va.gov/publications/cq/v5/n4/keane.html).

Rather than rely exclusively on reviews, which as we have noted can be risky, you can review individual studies yourself. One way to do that is by going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) government website (http://www.nlm.nih.gov) to get free access to a professional literature database called MedLine, which is provided by the National Library of Medicine and includes journal citations and abstracts. In response to increased calls for public access to taxpayer-supported research, NIH implemented a new public access policy in 2008 that required that any published results of NIH-funded research be submitted to a digital archive and made accessible to the public no later than 12 months after publication. This digital archive is called PubMed Central. The PubMed website (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) provides access to both MedLine citations and abstracts as well as full text articles when available through PubMed Central.

      Another option is provided by Google and called Google Scholar. You can access it through Google by entering Google Scholar as your search term. This Google search option is designed to broadly identify scholarly literature and is helpful in narrowing down sources to journal articles, chapters, reports, and books. For example, when we entered the search term EMDR into Google Scholar, the first 10 sources were all peer-reviewed articles from journals such as the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. If you do have access to a university library as a student, field instructor, or alumnus, Google Scholar is increasingly linked to the full text of articles through university library collections.

2.2.2 Search Terms

      Whether you use Medline, Google Scholar, or some other professional literature database, the process for electronically retrieving individual studies is essentially the same. Typically, you begin by entering a search term connected to your practice question. For example, questions about what interventions are most effective in treating physically or sexually abused girls with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – or about the comparative effectiveness of exposure therapy versus EMDR – might entail entering search terms like PTSD, exposure therapy, EMDR, sexual abuse, child abuse, and so on.

      On occasion, you may find yourself searching for research on a topic with which you are relatively unfamiliar. In this case, you may struggle to confidently come up with search terms that exactly capture what you're looking for. Many areas of practice might be described using jargon or terms that aren't immediately obvious to a newcomer. It could save you some precious time to have a brief discussion about possible search terms with someone who is more familiar with the area of practice within which you are searching such as a colleague or researcher.

      Your search term at some sites can be rather long. For example, at Google Scholar we conducted a search using the terms: treatment outcome with sexually abused Native Alaskan girls with PTSD. (Actually, we didn't need to use the word with in the search term, but we have kept it here to make the term more readable to you.) Alternatively, some databases will give you the option of coupling shorter search terms by using the connecting word and to more narrowly target the number of studies that will come up. For example, if you just enter the search term PTSD, you'll get an overwhelming list of bibliographic references covering all aspects of PTSD. However, if your search terms include both PTSD and treatment outcome, the list will be shorter and will be limited to references dealing with treatment outcome in PTSD. If you want to reduce further the number of irrelevant references that you'll need to wade through, you can expand your search term using the word and twice. For example, if your search term contains PTSD and treatment outcome and sexually abused girls, you'll get a much shorter list.

      You can also limit the types of research designs that will come up. For example, you can enter the search term PTSD and treatment outcome and randomized experiments and sexually abused girls. If you narrow your search term too much, however, you might not get enough useful references. For example, if your search term is PTSD and treatment outcome and randomized experiments and sexually abused girls and Native Alaskans, you'll probably find no references that meet all your specifications. (We tried this and found none, although some tangential references did come up.) Finding the right types of research for your particular question requires that you know something about which types of research are best used to answer which kinds of questions.

If