In honor of World Evidence-Based Healthcare Day, held annually on October 20, we wanted to share some tools to help you keep up with the evidence!
Point-of-care resources like DynaMed synthesize evidence on conditions, management, patient evaluation, and other clinically relevant topics. PubMed searches retrieve original research articles, from case studies to meta-analyses. McMaster Health Knowledge Refinery (HKR) provides tools to search pre-appraised research articles and be alerted to the most relevant and impactful studies.
McMaster Health Knowledge Refinery (HKR) helps practitioners stay up-to-date on the latest, high-quality, clinically relevant, and practice-changing evidence in fields, including medicine, rehabilitation, and knowledge translation. HKR research associates select articles reporting on treatments, diagnostics, and prognostic studies, as well as systematic reviews, from 100-plus journals, including core titles like JAMA, NEJM, and The Lancet.
During critical appraisal, research associates tag articles by type, purpose, population, and clinical specialty, to improve findability. For quality assurance, clinicians check these data, as well as index terms added by indexers.
While metadata helps users find and filter for relevant articles, the added value comes into play in the McMaster Online Rating of Evidence (MORETM). Practicing physicians, nurses, and therapists evaluate articles for 1) relevance and 2) newsworthiness. Once at least three practitioners evaluate the article, ratings are averaged, and articles receiving scores greater than four out of seven in both categories are added to the Premium LiteratUre Service (PLUS) database.
Users can create alerts to learn of new articles meeting selected notification criteria, i.e. thresholds for relevance and newsworthiness, specific disciplines and populations, etc.
To set alerts, users need a free account. Then, they can set alert preferences, create custom dashboards, and identify GW Himmelfarb as their PubMed outside tool https://www.evidencealerts.com/Account/MyProfile#OutsideTool, which links to Himmelfarb content via the Get It @ Himmelfarb button on PubMed.
EvidenceAlerts is one of many tools to help you stay up-to-date with the latest relevant and newsworthy research in your field.
Find more tools for keeping up with the literature.
Consult with a librarian for help setting up tables of contents or search alerts.
And don’t forget to critically appraise the research!
