Added April 2009

A second edition of Ann McKibbon's book PDQ: Evidence-Based Principles and Practice is now available. "Readers found the first edition useful in understanding health research and seeking this information. The second edition strengthened both purposes. It also adds 4 new chapters to the existing 9 that cover new areas of understanding and producing health research. All chapters from the previous edition have been revised. Several new chapters (hot topics) have been added: Clinical Prediction Guides, Decision Analyses, Differential Diagnosis and Disease Manifestation, and Health Technology Assessment.."[ Amazon.com editorial review]

Looking for an interactive tutorial on EBM? Try the Searching the Literature for Evidence-Based Medicine tutorial developed by librarians at the University of California at San Francisco. A link to the tutorial can be found in our Learning EBM section. Scroll down to find this and many other helpful tutorials under Learning EBM Online.

How systematic are search strategies for systematic reviews? An article in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology provides a detailed evidence-based guideline [that] facilitates the improvement of search quality through peer review, and thus the improvement in quality of systematic reviews. It is relevant for librarians/information specialists, journal editors, developers of knowledge translation tools, research organizations, and funding bodies."

Another analysis of systematic reviews appears in an article in the January issue of the Journal of Medlical Librarians Association. University of Florida librarians took a close look at the reporting of search strategies in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Results showed that "of the 65 reviews analyzed, none included all 7 recommended elements. Four reviews (6%) included 6 elements. Thirty-two percent (21/65) included 5 or more elements, with 68% (44/65) including 4 or fewer. Three included only 2 elements."

To see how "evidence-based rigor can breathe new life into story-telling", read EBP [Evidence-Based Practice] editor Jon Neher's version of the story of the three little pigs "among the 0.0001% of pigs that build houses (extrapolated from pig house prevalence studies)" and their encounter with the BBW (big bad wolf) who "gave himself an asthma attack (defined as a 20% reduction in FEV1) trying to blow down their houses."

Added January 2009

If you're a medical librarian and your budget cannot cover a CE course at this year's annual meeting of the MLA in Hawaii, there are several online courses in EBM that you might consider instead. Go to MLA's CE Clearinghouse where, you can search for courses by topic, instructor, region, and type (e-learning, for e.g.). Or go to the Learning EBM section of this web site and see what other options are listed!

We've added a new book to our Resources section, Alan Platt's Evidence Based Medicine for PDAs: A Guide for Practice. It Includes an audio-visual tutrorial CD. "Offered in a clear and applicable format, this is the only resource of its kind to combine the necessary information on the practical basics of PDA software and EBM practice in a comprehensive manner. “

More and more disciplines are jumping on the evidence based bandwagon!
Visit the Evidence Based Behavioral Practice web site where the EBBP creates training resources to help bridge the gap between behavioral health research and practice. Professionals from the major health disciplines are collaborating to learn, teach, and implement evidence-based behavioral practice (EBBP).

The Journal of Clinical Psychology devoted its July 2007 issue (v. 63, iss. 7) to evidence-based practice in clinical psychology. And back in October 2006 (v. 37, iss. 4), the Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools journal featured articles on evidence-based practice.

If you know of any journals in your profession that have similar special editions devoted to EBM or EBP, let us know so we can feature them in our Research section, too!

Also in our Research section is a recent article by Phillips & Glasziou published in the Postgraduate Medicine Journal which addresses the challenges of keeping abreast of clinical evidence. The PubMed abstract indicates that "key resources to give the trainee rapid access to evidence based answers are highlighted, as are efficient ways of keeping up to date with the emerging literature." Something from which we could all benefit, no doubt!

The folks at TRIP have introduced a new site TRIP Answers that features "an ever-expanding repository of over 5,300 clinical Q&As. They say it's a work in progress and they welcome your feedback!

Added October 2008

In a recent JAMA article, Victor Montori and Gordon Guyatt take a look at "Progress in Evidence-Based Medicine", highlighting the "enormous advance in ease of accessing and understanding information, the development of preprocessed evidence-based information and the increasing emphasis on patients' values and preferences in clinical decision making." They caution, however, against "reliance on easily obtained but potentially misleading evidence and the increase in commercial interests to produce and interpret evidence for physicians will remain potent."
JAMA. 2008:300(15):1814-1816

If you're searching for reliable evidence-based answers to clinical questions about drug therapies, the Drug Effectiveness Review Project conducts "systematic, evidence-based reviews of the comparative effectiveness and safety of drugs in many widely used drug classes." PubMed's Clinical Q&A is a title in the National Library of Medicine's e-book collection Bookshelf, that uses the findings of DERP to formulate and answer clinical questions, such as "Does age, ethnicity or other illnesses influence the safety or effectiveness of antiplatelet agents?", then links to evidence tables and other details from the reviews themsevles.

IFLA (International Federation of Lirary Associations & Institutions) held a satellite session in August 2008 on The Role of Evidence Based Research in Medical Libraries. Papers and presentations from the session are now available on the MLA web site including keynote speaker Ann McKibbon's presentation Being Evidence Based: The Shoemaker's Daughter gets Rollerblades.

Added July 2008

The GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) Working Group was established to address the issue of multiple grading systems used in health care and other fields with "little or no evidence of how well various presentations are understood.." CMAJ. 2003 September 30; 169(7): 677–680.

Since then, Gordon Guyatt and the GRADE Working Group have published a series of articles in the journal BMJ, citations for which can be found in Research section of this web site under Education Series.The first article, published in April 2008, explains "why many organisations use formal systems to grade evidence and recommendations and why this is important for clinicians; [it focuses]on the GRADE approach to recommendations. The next two articles examine how the GRADE system categorises quality of evidence and strength of recommendations. The final two articles focus on recommendations for diagnostic tests and GRADE’s framework for tackling the impact of interventions on use of resources."

Also, in the Research Section, we've added several citations for recently published articles about EBM Curriculum for residents, faculty, nurses, dentists, public health professionals and librarians.

Tired of scrolling though all the citations in the Research section? We were! So we've archived some of the older citations to make it easier to find more recent items. Most citations previously listed in Research and published before 2006 can be now be found in Archives.

Librarians at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and the School of Continuing Medical Education at UVA have developed a tutorial Navigating the Maze, subtitled "Feeling Good About Not Knowing Everything: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching and Practicing Medicine." Using the familiar pyramid approach, they have created helpful visual representations ranking the types of information found in computer-based resources such as OVID's Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews, InfoRetriever, TRIP, and SUMSearch.

See the Resources section of this web site for more details about these and other EBM databases, journals, and textbooks.

Several papers presented by librarians at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association held during May, 2008 in Chicago, were on topics related to evidence based medicine:

Analysis of Cochrane Collaborative Electronic Search Methods for Location and Identification of Studies
Jeanette de Richemond, AHIP, Medical Information Specialist and PhD Candidate, TA Information Center and School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, ECRI Institute and Rutgers University, Plymouth Meeting, PA, and New Brunswick, NJ

Evidence-based Medicine Tool Picking Made Easy: Simplifying the Tiers of Evidence Helps Students Choose the Best Information Tools for Their Clinical Questions
Rita Shaughnessy, Library and Information Specialist, Family and Community Medicine; Rita Vine, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Mindy Thuna, AstraZeneca Science Liaison Librarian; University of Toronto Mississauga Library, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada

PubMed and Evidence-based Medicine Training for Medical Students: Finding a Better Way
Brandi Tuttle, Information and Education Services Librarian; Connie Schardt, AHIP, Associate Director, Education Services; Anne Powers, AHIP, Information and Education Services Librarian; Megan von Isenburg, Associate Director, Information Services; Medical Center Library, Duke University, Durham, NC

Roundtable discussions are another featured event at the Annual Meeting of the MLA, and this year one of the themes was Expert Searching. Participants identified several recent articles about finding evidence based information in the literature:

Walker-Dilks C, Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB; Hedges Team.
Cummulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature search strategies for identifying methodologically sound causation and prognosis studies.
Appl Nurs Res. 2008 May;21(2):98-103.

Ritchie G, Glanville J, Lefebvre C.
Do published search filters to identify diagnostic test accuracy studies perform adequately?
Health Info Libr J. 2007 Sep;24(3):188-92.

Haase A, Follmann M, Skipka G, Kirchner H.
Developing search strategies for clnical practice guidelines in SUMSearch and Google Scholar and assessing their retrieval performance.
BMC Med Res Methodol. 2007 Jun 30;7:28.

This section compiled by:
Karen Crowell, UNC Chapel Hill
Last modified on May 6, 2009