Drug Concept
The first major concept in this question is the specific category of drugs called “proton pump inhibitors.”
Finding Keywords Needed for a Drug Class Search
If you were going to complete an exhaustive search concerning the class of drugs “proton pump inhibitors,” you would need to include all of the following terms:
- drug class name/s
- singular and plural form/s of the drug class name/s
- abbreviation/s for the drug class name/s
- singular and plural form/s of the abbreviation/s for the drug class name/s
- English generic name of each drug in the class (whether this would include drugs not approved for use in the U.S. would depend on the clinical question)
- U.S. trade name/s of each drug
- Foreign generic name of each drug
- Investigational names of each drug
- CAS registry numbers of each drug
- International trade names of each drug
In practice the number of trade names is sometimes so enormous that the available search engines cannot handle a search that includes all of the brand/trade names. In that case, one must consider searching without trade names or only including the most important trade names.
For the purpose of this first, tutorial search, you will just complete a routine, relatively thorough (but not exhaustive) search and will include the types of terms listed above in bold-face. Your pharmacy is located in the U.S., so you only need to investigate drugs that are approved in the U.S.
AHFS Drug Information (available at UNMC via UpToDate LexiDrug) can provide all of the bold-face terms for FDA-approved drugs and is organized by drug class. It is available through UNMC’s “UpToDate LexiDrug” license. Click here to open UpToDate LexiDrug in the adjacent screen.
In the future, you can access AHFS DI either by clicking the relevant link on the “COP Research Guide” homepage or by going to the library’s homepage, clicking on “Resources,” then clicking on “Drug Resources,” and, finally, clicking on the “UpToDate LexiDrug” link/button.
