A well-defined research question helps identify the concepts to search to answer your question.
- Clearly state the objectives of the review (what question are you trying to answer?)
- Ask yourself if you've considered the FINER components:
- Feasibility: Is the question answerable? Is it doable?
- Interesting: Is your question interesting to others besides yourself? Does it fill a meaningful gap in the literature?
- Novel: Is your question novel? New? Looking at a different population?
- Ethical: Is it ethical?
- Relevant: Is it relevant or practical for policy and/or /practice?
Search Frameworks - Search frameworks help you create a research question by suggesting elements you to consider. Not all questions are suited for a single framework. Several of the more common frameworks are found below.
PICO
- Population/Patient/Problem - What is the population or characteristics?
- Intervention - What is the intervention, prognostic factor, treatment, etc.?
- Comparison - What is the comparator, if any?
- Outcome - What are the expected outcomes, improvements, measures, etc?
May also include one or more of the following:
- Time - Is there a specific time-frame involved?
- Type of Question - Diagnosis, Therapy, Etiology/Harm/Prevention, Prognosis
- Type of Study - Prospective, Retrospective, Cohort, Case-Control, Randomized Controlled Trial, etc.
PISCO
- Population/Patient/Problem - What is the population or characteristics?
- Intervention - What is the intervention, prognostic factor, treatment, etc.
- Setting (if appropriate) - Hospital, Outpatient, School, Rural
- Comparison or intervention (if appropriate) - What are you comparing the intervention with?
- Outcome - What is the outcome you want to measure or achieve
SPICE
- Setting - What is the setting/context? Where?
- Population/Perspective - Who are the users, potential users, stakeholders of the particular service? For whom?
- Intervention - What is being done?
- Comparison - What else has been tried?
- Evaluation - What measurement will be used to determine the success? What is the result?
ECLIPSE
- Expectation - Why is the information needed?
- Client Group - Who needs, or will use, the information?
- Location - Where is the service taking place?
- Impact - What is being evaluated? How will success be measured?
- Professionals - Who provides the service?
- Service - What is the service being evaluated?