This box lives at Nursing Subject Guide > Evidence-Based Practice and PICOT Questions
It is included on the PICOT Questions page of the Nursing Library Module Canvas Module
What is a PICOT Question?
The PICOT question format is a consistent "formula" for developing answerable, researchable questions. When you write a good one, it makes the rest of the process of finding and evaluating evidence much more straightforward.
- P - Population, patient, or problem
- Examples: Age, gender, ethnicity, individuals with a certain disorder
- I - Intervention or indicator
- Examples: Exposure to a disease, risk factor, prognostic factor, treatment
- C - Comparison or control
- Examples: Placebo or no intervention, absence of risk factor, absence of disease
- O - Outcome
- Examples: Risk of disease, accuracy of a diagnosis, rate of occurrence of adverse outcome
- T - Time
- Examples: The time it takes for the intervention to achieve an outcome or how long participants are observed
Examples from Melnyk, B. M., & Fineout-Overholt, E. (2019). Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice (2nd ed). Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Tip
Not all PICOT questions will include every component—for example, a 'meaning' question may not have an intervention, and the time element might be implied elsewhere in the question.
For example, your question might be: Is Vitamin C more effective than echinacea in reducing the recovery time for the common cold? You can break that down into the PICOT format and use those terms as keywords for your searches.
- P: Adult with a cold
- I: Vitamin C
- C: Echinacea
- O: Reduced cold symptoms
- T: Length of cold
The PICOT format will help you translate your question from an initial broad topic or a question specific to an individual patient's experience, to a concrete, objective question that you can find clinical evidence to answer