Dental Elf questionnaire

Dental Elf is asking readers to take a survey and enter a £30 Amazon voucher prize draw.

I've blogged about Dental Elf previously and personally have an RSS feed to my Google Reader account so that I can keep an eye on latest research. The site doesn't critically appraise the articles like the Evidence-Based Dental Journal does but it does alert me to papers I might want to delve into....

TRIP and its PICO

TRIP now includes PICO search

TRIP Database has just been redesigned and now incorporates a PICO search box alongside the google-style one. I've blogged about PICOs before and it's great to see a major search engine innovating with them. There's a screencast here http://www.screenr.com/c9y8

One suggestion, though - I would avoid trying to fill each of the 4 boxes. It's likely you'll end up with very few papers if you do. When I begin a search I usually start with search terms around just two concepts - say the problem / population and the intervention or intervention and comparison. If I find then that there are loads of hits with irrelevant outcomes, say, I may then add terms for the outcome of interest to me. But this is rare.