SUNY Pre-Med Scholars
Health Sciences: Searching 101
Foreground vs. Background Questions
In Evidence Based Practice, there are these two types of questions.
Background Questions:
General questions that help you to build context and understanding. Answers are found in books and textbooks, clinical practice guidelines, and review articles.
Example questions:
What causes migraines? Search: cause and migraines
How is Type II Diabetes treated? Search: treatment and type 2 diabetes
What is the prognosis for stroke? Search: prognosis and stroke
Some common resources for finding answers to background questions include:
- Access Suite
- Clinical Key
- UptoDate- login required
- Dynamed.
Foreground Questions:
Specific questions intended for making clinical decisions. They are specific to a patient or particular population and they usually focus on comparisons: two drugs, two treatments, two diagnostic tests, etc.
Foreground questions may be further categorized into one of 4 major types: treatment/therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, or etiology/harm.
You would search journal article databases for insight to a foreground question.
A well known model for building a clinical foreground question is called PICO(T). It can be a very useful strategy for organizing and focusing your question.
P - Patient/Problem/ Population
I - Intervention
C - Comparison
O - Outcome
(T) - Time (when applicable)
Example question: Does hand washing (I), compared to not washing hands (C), among healthcare workers (P) reduce hospital acquired infections (O) over the course of a summer (T)?
Some common sources for finding answers to foreground questions include:
Printable resource lists
- Searching Foreground and Background QuestionsFurther details and examples of foreground and background questions.
- General Searching ResourcesProvides tips on when to search in books vs when to seek out journal articles. Also details some time-saving tips for searching for information.
- Common Health Science ResourcesThese are the commonly used resources for answering health sciences questions, with a link and description for each resource.
- Health Sciences ProfessionsResources about education, training, and roles of various health sciences professionals in the areas of medical, nursing, physician assistant, public health, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and pharmacy.
How to read scholarly journal articles
- Art of Reading a Journal Article: Methodically and effectivelyThis is an often-cited article from PubMed on how to efficiently read medical articles. It offers useful tables and graphics that help aide understanding.
- How I read a Paper!From Sketchy EBM. This may be really helpful when you're in medical school and beyond. A shortcut to effectively and quickly reading a medical article. 4 minute video.
- How to Read for Grad SchoolA really useful article for reading any kind of scholarly article that you are required to read in college. The title specifies Graduate School, but it's handy for Undergrad too.
- Understanding Health Research: A tool for making sense of health studiesAnother article on the topic. Well written and easy to understand.
Open-Access Journal Resources
- PLOS OneCovers subject areas across science, engineering, medicine, and the related social sciences and humanities. Highly respected science resource, and free access for anyone.
- Frontiers InPeer-reviewed open access journals that focus on current research in various areas of science, health, engineering, humanities and social sciences and more.
- Medline PlusUse this resource to get medical and health information in plain language. It's also an excellent resource for patients and their families.
- Science DailySnapshots of the latest in science news, written in plain language, with links to original research articles.
- DOAJ (Database of Open Access Journals)Covers areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities from all countries and all languages.
- Google ScholarLinks to articles on websites and in databases
- Google Dataset SearchIf you need to search for data
- MedRxivPre-print server for health sciences. Not yet peer-reviewed, but a good resource for the most current information.
Helpful medical websites
- Evidence Based Practice TutorialsExcellent, brief interactive tutorials created by Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. Evidence-Based Practice is the standard of care in all heath professions.
- EBM ExplainedFrom Sketchy EBM. What is evidence based medicine? 4 minute video.
- Last Updated: Oct 31, 2023 2:40 PM
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