LibAnswers

Generating search terms:

Once you've developed a research question in any format, PICO or otherwise, the literature search begins.

You can try searching any library database or Google Scholar with your PICO terms. In fact, PubMed has a PICO search page where you can try it out, https://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/pico/piconew.php linked here. However, you will likely find that for most topics, this search will be narrow enough that it will eliminate some articles that would be useful for your research.

Does this translate to "don't search or articles with your PICO terms?" Not exactly. But you need to do more than that.

Some ideas to generate search terms to use in your search.

Scan abstracts: You will usually find one really good article when you first start to search. It may be that the article is not available in full text and you can only get the abstract. Two things:
The abstract is still helpful in the beginning stages, to figure out additional search terms.
We can always figure out where the article can be found in the library or Google Scholar, and/or you can visit https://www.mchs.edu/academics/library and find the Interlibrary Loan link to place a document delivery request so we can find the article for you.

Take a look at the abstract of this article: https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/173001/images/diabetesarticle.png
Look at all the terms you can pull from here to add to a list of terms to search you might not have thought of some of these:
            diabetes education
            community health workers
            glycemic control
            self-management
            diabetes knowledge, self-care behaviors, self-efficacy, A1C
            perceived competence
        
 Borrow subject terms:  If you are searching PubMed or a library database, each article has a record page, and most records have subject headings listed. These subject headings can be used to search that database and others for more articles like the one you are looking at. For the above article, the subject headings in PubMed, called MESH terms, are: https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/173001/images/meshterms.png

Glycated Hemoglobin A may be a new search term for you. I also see:

Patient Education

Self Care

Teaching methods

Hispanic Americans

Try plugging any of those terms into a search of the database you are in.
https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/173001/images/pubmeddiabetessearch.png

Search for MESH terms
In the above example, we found MESH terms because Medline, which is searched in PubMed, uses MESH terms as their subject terms. But you could also search Medline citations in PubMed, using MESH terms by using the https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/ MESH search page. The link to Des Moines University's PubMed video tutorials and a MESH search tutorial are below.

More news you can use:

https://youtu.be/uyF8uQY9wys Use MeSH to Build a Better PubMed Query (3:02)
https://dmu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=11b0573e-6891-43b1-830a-ab5a015c1d79&start=undefined Introduction to PubMed (5:39)

https://dmu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=4abf23f8-eaa3-43d1-a606-abb100f4e7bc PubMed Advanced Search (6:03)

https://dmu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=99e34740-c938-40e8-a009-ab5a015c26c4 Limiting to Levels of Evidence in PubMed (3:47)