We have viewed sources for "background" questions. Now, let's consider another type of research question: "Foreground" or more specific queries.
Foreground (PICO T) questions seek evidence to answer a need for clinical information related to a specific Problem, (or Patient, or Population), and an Intervention (or therapy). Clinical questions also require that the evidence be the most recent and highly specific, which is typically found in the scholarly journal literature.
To find scholarly literature, you will start with an article database. (Initially you might conduct a background search on the narrower topic to assess the existent state of the literature. What kind of results do you get? If results are too numerous the search might need to be narrowed. If results are too few, you will have to think about broadening.)
What is a database? Databases are electronically searchable collections of citations to journal articles, books, dissertations, and other items, published and unpublished). Database citations (records) are organized into searchable fields: author, title, source, date, publication type, etc. The attributes of the database records can assist searchers to locate items by using the fields to specify search terms.
Article citations describe the contents of journal articles.
Databases may be interdisciplinary and cover a large scope of topic areas. For example: Proquest Central. PubMed (MEDLINE), CINAHLPlus, and PsycINFO are examples of specialized databases for health sciences topics. Databases provide access to citations for:
Citations and abstracts of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles and professional association news and information for thousands of publications. Most comprehensive nursing and allied health database. CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.
The premier full-text medical database. Contains scholarly articles on all health sciences topics.