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
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
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
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
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?
APA PsycINFO 1887-Current
CINAHL
SocINDEX with Full Text
Includes selected journals, monographs, and conference papers. 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
PubMed
Embase
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
Good for: Accessing medical information.
Contains: 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