We recommend using the latest version of IE11, Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Please take our follow-up survey about this EBM Guide!
It should take less than 10 minutes. Thanks!
In the Evidence Based Medicine paradigm, questions can be categorized into two types to help you grow your knowledge and practice. By determining the type of question, it will guide you to the type of evidence to review for an answer.
1. Background questions concern general knowledge of a condition, disease, process, etc. These types of questions generally have only two parts:
Often these questions can best be answered by using a health sciences textbook or consulting a clinical point-of-care tool like DynaMed or UpToDate.
Examples:
2. Foreground questions are specific knowledge questions
Foreground questions are best suited to the PICO model as it captures the essential elements of your information need to help translate that question into a search query. To obtain answers, generally it requires a search of the primary medical literature in databases like PubMed or Embase.
Examples:
Foreground questions may be further categorized into a type of clinical question such as treatment/therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, or etiology/harm that will also help in seeking out appropriate evidence types to address your inquiry. See more about question types on the CLINICAL FILTERS page.
The PICO Model is a format to help define your information need into a clinical question. By organizing a clinical question using PICO, the searcher can use the specific terms to aid in finding clinically relevant evidence in the literature. PubMed alone has over 34 million citations to search through so being able to reference a defined clinical question when reviewing title/abstracts will help filter the irrelevant materials out of the search results.
P |
Patient, Population, or Problem |
How would I describe a group of patients similar to mine? |
I |
Intervention, Prognostic Factor, or Exposure |
Which main intervention, prognostic factor, or exposure am I considering? |
C |
Comparison or Intervention (if appropriate) |
What is the main alternative or gold standard to compare with the intervention? |
O |
Outcome you would like to measure or achieve |
What can I hope to accomplish, measure, improve, or affect for my patient or population? |
T |
What Type of clinical question are you asking? |
Diagnosis, Etiology/Harm, Therapy, Prognosis, Prevention categories |
T |
Is Time important to your search? |
Duration of data collection, duration of treatment, time to follow-up |
S |
What Study type do you want to find? |
What study design/methodology will address the clinical question according to the evidence hierarchy? |
For more on searching by Type of Question, see CLINICAL FILTERS.
For more on searching by Study Design, see LEVELS OF EVIDENCE.
The content of this website, consisting of https://researchguides.uic.edu/ebm and it's sub-pages, is being shared as an Open Educational Resource (OER) with a Creative Commons License. For a definition of OER, licensing information, and our preferred attribution statement, please see our OER Information page.