I chose to search Pub Med for my clinical question. My clinical problem is how much exercise do children with ADHD receive in a day. It was very confusing at the beginning of my search. As I typed in keywords I would end up with thousands of articles about ADHD. Then I started to limit the parameters of the search. I looked for ADHD and exercise. I still received over a thousand articles. I then set limits to children aged 12 to 18. That took a few hundred off of the thousands. When I got very specific on what exactly I wanted I could not find a single article. My search was very time consuming, I spent a total of 5 hrs looking for information and trying to import it to EndNote. I never did figure out how to import. Having to broad and to narrow of searches will bring you nothing but wasted time. Having a specific item you want to search for does not always work out; there may not have been studies. For example I just wanted to know; if studies have been conducted about using exercise as an alternative to medication for children diagnosed with ADHD. At first I had over 40 thousand articles. Then I narrowed my search using keywords. The problem is I narrowed my search too much and only came up with six hits.
A couple of the barriers would be time and ease of use. Using a Pub Med search in daily practice would be applicable only if you knew how to use it effectively. There is a very time consuming factor in narrowing down a search to a reasonable amount of information. If this resource was used frequently the application would not seem so tricky. Time would be a huge factor in implementing a search for information. There would be no way to spend 5 hours a day doing research. When a search is done it needs to be quick and to the point. Setting limits helps but does not solve the problem of retrieving information that you don’t really need.