LibGuides: PBL Resource Guide: Evidence & Up to Date

Foreground Questions & Resources

As you begin to ask more complex questions, you will have to start going to the research (also called "evidence") in order to synthesize answers. These types of questions are called foreground questions, and if they involve patients or patient care they are called clinical questions.

Foreground Questions

Often interested in outcome(s) due to some sort of intervention or an observed natural occurrence.
Might be about a process, lifecycle, etc. for something that is not well-researched.
If focused on a patient or population of people, often take the form of PICO (Patient/Population, Intervention, Comparison (intervention), Outcome)
- Example: In patients over 75-years-old with high blood pressure, do ACE inhibitors compared to beta-blockers provide a better quality of life?

Searching Tips

Search using short phrases or single words to represent ideas in your question.
Use Boolean Operators to be more efficient and tie your search terms together.
Use filters to make your results even more specific - especially for publication type, dates, and language.
- AVOID using "free full text"

Research free icons designed by Freepik https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/research_1162251?term=research via @flaticon

Article Databases

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Provides free access to MEDLINE, the searchable article database that indexes medical, nursing, dental, veterinary, health care, and preclinical sciences journal articles.

Trip Medical Database
Trip is a clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care.

Embase This link opens in a new window
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Embase is a searchable index to scholarly articles in medicine, biomedical sciences, and allied health subjects. It covers more European journals than PubMed.
Embase content is indexed using a specialized thesaurus, Emtree, that includes biomedical, chemical, and drug terms. There is a special focus on drugs and devices.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
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Scopus is an index to peer-reviewed scientific, medical, technical, and social science literature.
Scopus also features a citation index, allowing you to find the papers that cite a specific piece of research.

Even More

Web of Science This link opens in a new window 1990- Web of Science is a platform for Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Index, Journal Citation Reports, Biological Abstracts, MEDLINE, and Inspec. Help?
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APA PsycINFO 1887-Current This link opens in a new window 1800- The American Psychological Association's international psychology database indexes journal articles, books and dissertations.
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Update frequency: Updated monthly
PsycINFO, from the American Psychological Association (APA), contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, all in psychology and related disciplines, dating as far back as the 1800s. 97 percent of the covered material is peer-reviewed. The database also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business, law and others.
CINAHL This link opens in a new window 1982- The main index for nursing literature and allied health.
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Update frequency: weekly
The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature is an index to literature in nursing and allied health. This database provides indexing, abstracting, and full text for over 1,600 current nursing and allied health journals and publications dating back to 1982, totaling over 700,000 records.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window 1895-Indexes the literature of sociology and related disciplines.
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Includes full text for selected journals, monographs, and conference papers and contains full text for over 325 journals dating back to 1895. Encompasses all subdisciplines of sociology, including abortion, anthropology, criminology, criminal justice, marriage & family, politics, religion, rural sociology, social psychology, social structure, social work, sociological theory, sociology of education, substance abuse, urban studies, and many others.

Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analysis

Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window A collection of evidence based medicine databases.
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Update frequency: Updated quarterly
Includes Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Methodology Register, Health Technology Assessment Database, and NHS Economic Evaluation Database.
PubMed This link opens in a new window PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine that provides free access to MEDLINE, the NLM database of indexed citations and abstracts to medical, nursing, dental, veterinary, health care, and preclinical sciences journal articles. It also includes additional selected life sciences journals not found in MEDLINE.
Embase This link opens in a new window Embase is an index to scholarly articles in medicine, biomedical sciences, and allied health subjects.
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Embase content is indexed using a specialized thesaurus, Emtree, that includes biomedical, chemical, and drug terms. There is a special focus on drugs and devices.

Trip Medical Database
Trip is a clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care.

Point-of-Care Tools

UpToDate This link opens in a new window
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UpToDate includes expert, peer reviewed, physician written health information.
UpToDate content is reviewed and updated regularly to maintain the currency, accuracy, and relevance of information. It includes: a drug database, drug interactions program, patient information handouts, medical calculators, treatment recommendations, and articles in medical specialty areas.

For instructions on how to download mobile health apps, please click here.

PBL Resource Guide

Katie Houk, UME Librarian