[Effective literature searching. Focusing the question and using PubMed queries]

Apart from clinical and social expertise, the availability of contemporary knowledge is a key component in organisations within the health system that aim for excellence and competitiveness. Efficient literature searching is within this context a core business of evidence-based medicine. In addition to the need for valid data, the retrieval of information based on published literature has so far constituted a critical hurdle. Based on these requirements, two core issues for success with respect to literature searching are described: First, the generation of a structured question to form the basis of the most promising search terms. Second, a new feature of the web service of the national library of medicine, called "clinical queries", that allows the application of predefined filters to allocate clinically relevant data in terms of published clinical trials and systematic reviews.