Module 2 Part 1 Electronic Index

The clinical problem I was researching was prescription drug abuse in the state of Utah. I used PubMed as my electronic index. Although a great database to retrieve information about prescription drug abuse, I was unable to find information specifically for the state of Utah. I don’t think this is because there is not any published information, but rather none submitted to this particular database. In general, I was able to find numerous articles on this topic and by limiting my search to specific age groups and recently published articles, the list became more manageable to sort through. The database facilitated my ability to construct an efficient search because of the nature of the database itself. It contains peer reviewed articles and synthesis of studies following the problem of prescription drug abuse. Other research questions were also generated as I sorted through and read abstracts helping to narrow and focus the search if I was performing a literature review for a paper. The search was very time consuming as there were many articles to sort and read through. The most time consuming part would be the actual reading of abstracts to make sure I wanted to invest my time to read the rest of the article. A barrier to using the index in daily practice is that one can probably do a very extensive literature review, which would give grounds to conduct a study specifically for the state of Utah, but most articles I read included information about drug abuse itself, not so much the evaluative piece after implementing strategies to reduce abuse rates. Over all, PubMed is a great place to begin a literature review.