PEDro

In PEDro, individual trials, reviews or guidelines are referred to as records. The search results are displayed in a list by title. Clinic practice guidelines are shown first, followed by reviews and then trials. Trials are sorted by PEDro score. You can see more information about a record by clicking on its title. This gives a Detailed Search Result, which includes author, title, method, method score and (provided that the publisher has granted permission) abstract. You can get back to the Search Results page from the Detailed Search Results page using the Back button on your browser. You can also select records for ease of saving, printing or emailing.

To find a record or group of records:

• Go to PEDro at http://www.pedro.fhs.usyd.edu.au/index.html and select advanced search from the drop-down menu. You don't need a password to search PEDro.
• Specify what you are searching for, either by typing text into the text boxes or selecting from the pull-down menus of one of the search fields. Generally it is most efficient to search by typing one or more search terms in the Abstract field.
• You don't need to enter search terms in each box. For most searches a maximum of three boxes is sufficient (and often one or two well chosen words in the Abstract field is sufficient).
• You can search for variants of words (such as oedema and edema, or leg and legs) by using wildcards.
• At the bottom of the Search page, select the number of records you want to be displayed on the Results page (between 5 and 50). If you do not make a selection, the search will return 20 records on each search page.
• You can perform more powerful searches by entering search terms into more than one field and combining search terms with the AND and OR operators.
• Click on the Start Search button to search the PEDro database.

Using Wildcards

Often it is useful to search for a number of variations of a word. For example you may be interested in articles which contain either the word enthesopathy or the word enthesopathies. By default, PEDro takes any word or part of a word you type in one of the four text fields (Abstract, Author, Source or Title) and looks for any record containing those letters at the start of a word. So, typing enthesopath will return records containing enthesopathy or enthesopathies.

You can also look for variations at the beginning of a word by using an asterisk (*) to indicate any letter or group of letters. For example, if you wanted to find papers on edema, oedema, lymphedema or lymphoedema, you could type *edema in a text field. The asterisk denotes unlimited truncation - it can represent any number of letters (including 0). Putting an asterisk at the end of a word is not necessary, as PEDro searches in this way by default. If you put an asterisk at the beginning of a word, PEDro will not also look for variants at the end of the word (that is, PEDro can’t simultaneously search for variants at the beginning and end of the same word).

Another form of wildcard is the @ symbol, which denotes mandated (single character) truncation. You can use @ when there are single character variations on a word. For example, if you were searching by author and did not know if the author's name was Rawson or Rawsen, you could search for Raws@n.

To search for an exact match, type = before search criteria. For example =Bo finds all the records containing Bo K or Williams BO, but not records containing Boers M.

Combining search terms

To search using all the search terms in the fields on the Search page, use the AND operator (by clicking the button next to Match all search terms at the bottom of the Search page). PEDro will search for only those trials, reviews or guidelines which contain all of the search terms you have specified. The effect is to restrict the number of retrieved records compared to the number that would be returned with any one of the individual search terms. Click on this button to combine search terms when a search using a single search term returns too many records.

To search using any of the search terms in the fields on the Search page, use the OR operator (by clicking the button next to Match any search term at the bottom of the Search page). PEDro will search for trials, reviews or guidelines which contain any of the search terms you have specified. The effect is to increase the number of retrieved records compared to the number that would be returned with any one of the individual search terms. Click on this button to combine search terms when a search using a single search term returns too few records.

When you put two words in one field, PEDro treats these as if the two words were in different fields. So, if you type lateral epicondylitis in the Title field and click on the Match all search terms button, PEDro will return only those records with both the words lateral and epicondylitis in the title. If, instead, you type lateral epicondylitis in the title field and click on the Match any search term button, PEDro will return records with either the word lateral or epicondylitis in the title.

You cannot mix ANDs and ORs in a single search. However, you can make PEDro search for two (or more) words (and intervening spaces or punctuation) as if they were one by enclosing the words in inverted commas (eg: "lateral epicondylitis"). Effectively this combines the two terms with an AND operator. Alternatively, you can use the wildcard operators (*) to look for related words (eg, *edema - see the section on wildcards above). Effectively this combines related terms (in this example, edema, oedema, lymphedema and lymphoedema) with an OR operator. The combined terms can then by combined with other terms (or even other sets of terms combined with inverted commas or wildcards) using AND or OR operator, if desired.
It is possible to put wildcards in between inverted commas. For example "Medicine * Rehabilitation" will return records containing both Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.

The methods for combining search terms are summarised in the following table.

Specifying values within a range

A range of values for a search field can be specified as part of your search. For example, you may be interested in records published between 1990 and 2000. You can do this by entering the following in the "Published Since" field: 1990 ... 2000. This operator ... (3 dots) can also be used to specify records published during a single year. For example, to find trials published in 1990, type 1990...1990. The same operator can be used to search for records with a particular range of quality scores.

Missing abstract?

Permission from journal publishers is sought before abstracts of records on PEDro are displayed. When this permission has not yet been granted (which is quite common) or the request has been refused (which is rare), abstracts are not displayed. Some records do not have abstracts because that is the style of the journal in which they were published. If you search for terms in the abstract field you will not search records that do not have abstracts.

Selecting records

Records can be selected from the Search Results or Detailed Search Results pages. These records can later be viewed on the Selected Search Results page by clicking on the Display Selected Records button on either the Search Results or Detailed Search Results page.

The Display Selected Records function makes saving or printing the bibliographic details and abstracts of several records easy. Selected records can be saved or printed using the file menu on your browser. Alternatively, selected records can be emailed (for example to your home email address if you are searching at work) by using the Email Results button on the Selected Search Results page.

The Continue Searching button on the Search Results page returns you to the Search page. Any records which have been previously selected remain selected when you continue searching. The Start New Search button on the Selected Search Results page clears all selected records (so that there are then no selected records). Starting a new search from the Detailed Search Results page will also clear all the selected records.

Individual selected records can be removed (de-selected) by the Remove This Record button on the Selected Search Results page. If you inadvertently select a record twice, the duplicate titles will appear first on the list in the Selected Search Results page with a Duplicate Selection message. Remove the record by clicking on the Remove This Record message. The other copy of the record will remain selected.

Exporting to refworks

Display your list of selected records, then save them to your desktop as a text file (txt format). Double click on the file to open the text editor. Delete the "heading" of the file so that the first line starts with the Author field. Delete any spare lines at the end of your list of records. Save the text file. Log in to RefWorks and select the References menu. Click import. Select Pedro in both the import filter and database fields. Use the browse button to select the references file on your desktop and make sure that the "encoding" option matches the format you used when saving the text file to your desktop. If you didn't select one, just ignore this stage. Click the import button to read the references into RefWorks. Don't forget to move the information from the last imported folder to another one to store it safely.