Identifying Information Resources

After successfully formulating the clinical question in Step 1, you need to find relevant evidence to help answer your question. You will often need to consult several types of information resources.

Information resources generally fall into three categories and are used in sequential order depending on need and applicability to your question. The three categories are:

• Background Resources
• Filtered Resources
• Unfiltered Resources

Note that some resources can contain both background information and filtered information. Some background resources are also filtered resources and may apply to a variety of question types. An example of this is DynaMed, which offers background information on a variety of conditions and treatments, and also contains filtered information to aid in clinical decision making.

In this step, we will identify different types of resources, as well as some search strategies for using those resources.