Determine the type of information you need. The questions that arise are typically divided into Background or Foreground questions:
BACKGROUND QUESTIONS
- Ask for general knowledge
- Disease processes or clinical contexts
- They ask "who, what, when, why, where or how" about a single disease, drug, intervention or concept
- Secondary sources such as textbooks, ebooks, nursing/medical reference sources and review articles can provide relevant and reliable answers
- Clinical guidelines and other evidence based medicine resources will help answer these questions
FOREGROUND QUESTIONS
- Ask for specific knowledge
- Applied to specific patient and/or problem
- Often compare two things: two drugs, two treatments, the prognosis of two groups, two diagnostic tests, etc.
- Requires primary sources that synthesize a wide range of knowledge
- Requires a comprehensive search of the literature
- Requires a search strategy using PICO (please refer to Evidence-Based Medicine section of the library website)
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