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What type of question is this?
Describes the differences between background and foreground questions.
Resources for Background Questions
Provides links to two textbook collections that are helpful for background questions.
What type of question is this?
Asking an answerable question may seem easy - we ask questions about all kinds of things regularly. Asking a question whose answer can be found in the medical journal literature or in a textbook starts with understanding the question type being asked. Questions can be categorized as either background or foreground-type questions to help with targeting the best resources for finding relevant information.
Background questions
Background questions ask for general information, usually about a disorder, condition, illness, or injury. Examples of background questions are:
- What is the disorder?
- What causes it?
- How does it manifest?
- What are treatment options?
Background questions often contain the words what or how and seek general facts. This information forms the background knowledge base.
Foreground questions
Foreground questions typically are more specific questions, usually focused on a patient. For example, foreground questions might seek information about:
- Intervention/prevention
- Etiology/risk
- Diagnosis
- Prognosis
Understanding your information need by question type is important to the Evidence Based Practice process. Here is a schematic showing where this step, Identifying question type, fits between Asking a question related to the clinical scenario and Acquiring the information in resources.
Resources for Background Questions are included in the next box on this page.
The next steps in the EBP process for Foreground Questions (including how to 1. ASK a question and strategies and resources to 2. ACQUIRE the information) can be found on the numbered tabs on the left side navigation.
Resources for Background Questions
Textbooks and narrative reviews are good sources of information for background questions because they provide general overviews of the topic of your question. U-M Library provides access to several textbook collections where you can search for answers to background questions. Two great starting points are:
- ClinicalKey This link opens in a new windowElsevier's single search product for the clinical health sciences. (NOTE: Access to pdfs of books requires creation of a personal account)
- AccessMedicine This link opens in a new windowOffers a complete suite of clinical and educational content from leading books, including Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine.
Each textbook collection offers downloadable chapter PDFs. Section outlines provide quick navigation to relevant portions, and some textbooks contain relevant images, charts, and tables.
Narrative reviews, which gather and synthesize prior knowledge on a topic, are another source of background information. Narrative reviews can be found in article databases, like PubMed, by searching for the topic and applying the Review filter. Depending on the topic, this filter will return results with a number of different types of reviews. If you still aren't finding the answer to your background question after exploring the resources described here, contact thlibrary@umich.edu for a consultation.
Example
Searching for an answer to the background question What is diabetes mellitus? in each of these textbook collections yields a number of options for answering this need for information, including these textbook chapters:
The Color Atlas and Synopsis of Family Medicine, 3e Chapter 228: Diabetes Overview
