// Translate a clinical or research question into a PICO/PECO-structured PubMed + Europe PMC search strategy with MeSH terms, field tags, and search hedges. Use whenever the user asks a comparative-effectiveness, etiology, prognosis, diagnosis, or HEOR question, OR when they explicitly ask for a "search strategy".
Build a competitor pipeline view for a target / mechanism / indication — who is in the clinic, what phase, what differentiation. Use for BD / portfolio / commercial-strategy questions like "who else is developing X" or "what's the pipeline for indication Y".
Surface emerging safety signals for a drug or class from PubMed (case reports / letters / RCT AE tables), plus relevant trial AE disclosures. Use for pharmacovigilance triage, medical-affairs safety updates, or competitive risk assessment. NOT a substitute for formal PV systems.
Produce a literature-grounded mechanism-of-action explanation for a drug or drug class — receptor / pathway / downstream effects / clinical relevance — with a Nano Banana Pro diagram and citations. Use for medical-affairs MSL prep, internal training, or when the user asks "how does drug X work" or "what's the MoA of class Y".
Run a PRISMA 2020-aligned systematic-review workflow — identification → screening → eligibility → included — with a transparent record of exclusions at each step and a rendered PRISMA flow diagram. Use when the user asks for a systematic review, evidence map, scoping review, or any task that requires a defensible screening audit trail.
Build a target-validation dossier for a gene / protein / pathway — biology, disease association, druggability, existing programs, key publications, trial pipeline, safety signals. Use for early-stage discovery target review, portfolio decisions, or when the user asks "what do we know about target X".
| name | pico-search-strategy |
| description | Translate a clinical or research question into a PICO/PECO-structured PubMed + Europe PMC search strategy with MeSH terms, field tags, and search hedges. Use whenever the user asks a comparative-effectiveness, etiology, prognosis, diagnosis, or HEOR question, OR when they explicitly ask for a "search strategy". |
You are constructing a transparent, reproducible literature-search strategy for a pharmaceutical researcher. The goal is to produce a query that another analyst could re-run six months from now and get the same hits.
| Element | Clinical question | Etiology / safety question |
|---|---|---|
| P | Population | Population |
| I | Intervention | Exposure |
| C | Comparator | Comparator (often unexposed) |
| O | Outcome | Outcome |
Restate the user's question as a single PICO sentence and confirm with them before running searches if anything is ambiguous (especially the population — adults vs. pediatric, treatment-naive vs. refractory).
For each PICO element, build a concept block that combines:
[MeSH] field tag and explode by default.[Title/Abstract] for high-precision
blocks, no tag for high-recall blocks.Combine within a block with OR, between blocks with AND.
Use validated search hedges rather than ad-hoc filters:
(systematic review[PT] OR meta-analysis[PT])(cohort studies[MeSH] OR case-control studies[MeSH] OR observational study[PT])("real world"[TIAB] OR "real-world"[TIAB] OR registry[TIAB]) with the population block.("YYYY/MM/DD"[PDAT] : "YYYY/MM/DD"[PDAT]). Default to the last 5
years for active areas, 10 years for chronic-disease background.humans[MeSH] only when the user wants to exclude in-vitro /
animal work.Always report:
If hits exceed ~500, propose narrowing concept-by-concept; if hits are under ~10, propose loosening the highest-precision block first (typically the outcome).
search_pubmed for free-text + field-tag queries.advanced_search when the request specifies dates, MeSH, journal, or
publication type as discrete filters.search_europe_pmc for the parallel Europe PMC run (broader coverage).A pharma evidence-generation analyst should be able to take your output, paste the query into PubMed and Europe PMC, and confirm the hit count matches yours within a small drift (NCBI updates daily). Include the PRISMA-style "search executed on YYYY-MM-DD" line.