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What is PICO?

Do you want to know whether a Cochrane Review is relevant to you?

Look for the PICO.

PICO stands for four different potential components of a health question used in Cochrane Review research:

• Patient, Population or Problem
  • What are the characteristics of the patient or population (demographics, risk factors, pre-existing conditions, etc)?
  • What is the condition or disease of interest?
  • What is the intervention under consideration for this patient or population?
  • What is the alternative to the intervention (e.g. placebo, different drug, surgery)?
  • What are the included outcomes (e.g. quality of life, change in clinical status, morbidity, adverse effects, complications)?

  These components give you the specific who, what, when, where and how, of an evidence-based health-care research question.

  The PICO model is widely used and taught in evidence-based health care as a strategy for defining Review criteria, formulating questions and search strategies, and for characterizing included studies or meta-analyses.

  There are three different sorts of PICOs within Cochrane Reviews:

  • Review PICOs - Used to decide which studies to include in a Review. You can find this documented in the Methods section of the Review
  • Comparison PICOs – One Review may have multiple comparisons, which group different parts of the Review PICO in different ways, to answer more specific questions.
  • Included Study PICOs – Each included study has its own PICO which may include additional PICO components, such as other outcomes, that the Review is not interested in.

  Find out more about the Cochrane PICO linked data project.

  How can I use PICO on the Cochrane Library?

  PICO summaries on Cochrane reviews and Cochrane Clinical Answers

  For Cochrane intervention reviews, we display included PICO terms below the Abstract.

  

  This gives an at-a-glance summary of Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome for the review as annotated by Cochrane Community experts.

  With one click on a PICO term, users can see search results for reviews with the same included PICO term. There is also prominent Help material giving clear guidance on using PICOs, linking to the relevant section of the Cochrane Handbook.

  On the Review Information pages, MeSH and PICOs are now grouped together for easy discoverability.

  For Cochrane Clinical Answers, we display PICO terms for the Cochrane review from which the Answer is derived below the Answer.

  PICO summaries on search results

  For Intervention Reviews, included PICOs are also displayed on search results.

  

  Browse by PICO

  You can browse Cochrane content using themed groups of included PICOs from the Cochrane Library and Biblioteca Cochrane homepages.

  

  Users can discover Cochrane content using themed groups of included PICOs curated and maintained by Cochrane experts. With one click, users can see all available search results for categories with included PICOs.

  In addition, there is clear contextual help for those new to PICOs, with clear guidance on using PICOs and links to the relevant section of the Cochrane Handbook.

  Search by PICO

  PICO search allows you to use those same terms to find Reviews most relevant to your PICO questions.

  

  For example, the term "Diabetes Mellitus" is cited in Cochrane Reviews in some cases as a Population term, and in other cases as an Outcome term. PICO search allows you to search on the PICO context that you are interested in.

  Read more on PICO Search help