Pre-Clerkship Library Resources
Recommended Resources
- Duke EBP Interactive Modules - Evidence Based PracticeThis excellent series of short, interactive modules walks you through the EBP process. From Duke University's School of Medicine
- EBM Tools - CEBMGo-to resource for everything EBM: from search strategies for finding the evidence, to worksheets for appraising study types for your scenario, to descriptions of study designs, to calculating NNT and LR. Excellent source for EBP.
- PubMed interactive PICO question builderGuides you through forming your own PICO question and getting your results in PubMed
JAMA Evidence: Evidence Based Medicine eBook
- Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd edThe leading guide to the principles and clinical applications of evidence-based medicine. From JAMA Evidence.
Begining your search
Background and Foreground 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 Medicine (textbooks)
- Up to Date
- Essential Evidence Plus
- Review article in Pubmed
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. It can be a very useful strategy for organizing and focusing your question.
P - Patient/Problem/ Population
I - Intervention
C - Comparison
O - Outcome
Example question: Does hand washing (I), compared to not washing hands (C), among healthcare workers (P) reduce hospital acquired infections (O)?
Some common sources for finding answers to foreground questions include:
- PubMed
- Embase
- CINAHL
- TRIP
Go to the "Literature Search Strategies (PICO)" page to learn more
Guides for Searching the Literature
- Finding Evidence-Based Answers to Clinical Questions-- Quickly and EffectivelyA one-page tip sheet from UC Davis on which resources to search for the type of question you're asking.
- Common Health Science ResourcesThese are the commonly used resources for answering health sciences questions, with a link and description for each resource.
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.
- Understanding Health Research: A tool for making sense of health studiesAnother article on the topic. Well written and easy to understand.
- Trust It or Trash It?Quick, interactive tool to critically evaluate the quality of health information you find online - including websites, handouts, booklets, etc.
- Last Updated: Oct 29, 2024 1:46 PM
- URL: https://guides.upstate.edu/preclerkship
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