Evidências científicas no campo da Saúde Coletiva: da pergunta à formulação de estratégia de busca

Introduction: The increasing technical and scientific production in public health over the years requires from professionals and managersthe hability to find evidence that is useful for health care services systems and its practices.Objective: To assist readers to identify updated scientific production and are from different sources of information.Methods: Considering the diversity of scientific evidence sources and their technical specificities, basic considerations for planning and conducting structured searches were described.Results: A list of strategic data bases was presented for the Public Health field and a detailed guide was described to the reader of how to carry out structured searches in Pubmed and the Virtual Health Library (BVS).Conclusion: A systematized and explicit was obtained from the evidence in order to answer questions concerning public health is a practice that needs to be stimulated to better inform health care decision makers, systems and services.Key words: health based evidence, health information, public health