Designed to act as a PICO or ECLIPS for the social sciences the SPICE tool will help you find qualitative materials to support either your work or study. We think it’ll be a really useful tool for Public Health too!
Just like PICO and ECLIPS which we described way back in 2007 in a blog post titled Tools to Make Designing Evidence Based Search Strategies a Snip we think this tool will help you develop better search strategies and find better more relevant information so give it a go.
SPICE
SPICE Template click to download along with PICO and ECLIPS templates from Fade.
S – Setting – This is the ‘where’. What is the setting that is relevant to the studies you want to locate.
P – Population – This is the ‘who’. For this you need to think of age, sex, ethnic origins or other defining characteristics of the patient and the population.
I – Intervention – This is also sometimes known as exposure and makes up the ‘what’. This is what is happening to the patient or population, so it could be a drug or a therapy, a screening questionnaire or health improvement programme.
C – Comparison – With what are you comparing the intervention or population with. This could be the control group.
E – Evaluation – What are the evaluation factors that are relevant to the studies you want to find.
Where do I put the ANDs and ORs?
Anything within a column is an OR search (we recommend search for the terms within a column as a single search line).
Combine the results of your searches from within the columns with AND. Job Done!
You can download our SPICE template along with the PICO and ECLIPS templates here.
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