Best evidence topic report
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The usefulness of BETs
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Clinical scenario:
A physician thinks of doing a BET.
Three part question:
In [Emergency Medicine] is [the use of BETs] associated with [spending an
inordinate amount of time scanning through available studies to find so few
are relevant thatit is probably more time-efficient to spend the time
conducting one’s own trial instead]?
Search strategy:
All BETs from EMJ Online’s latest 3 issues.
Search outcome:
Altogether 20 BETs found, of which 17 showed that 95-99.7% of papers scanned
were useless for this purpose and the other 3 (marked with *) were not
incredibly time-efficient affairs either (but all 20 are listed).
November, 2000:
Topic 1: 53 papers 13 relevant (24.53%)*
Topic 2: 373 papers 4 relevant (1.07%)
Topic 3: 493 papers 8 relevant (1.62%)
Topic 4: 172 papers 4 relevant (2.33%)
Topic 5: 19 papers 1 relevant (5.26%)*
Topic 6: 251 papers 10 relevant (3.98%)
January, 2001:
Topic 7: 116 papers 4 relevant (3.45%)
Topic 8: 114 papers 3 relevant (2.63%)
Topic 9: 16 papers 2 relevant (12.5%)*
Topic 10: 543 papers 10 relevant (1.84%)
Topic 11: 295 papers 1 relevant (0.34%)
Topic 12: 114 papers 5 relevant (4.39%)
March, 2001:
Topic 13: 133 papers 2 relevant (1.50%)
Topic 14: 280 papers 4 relevant (1.43%)
Topic 15: 162 papers 5 relevant (3.09%)
Topic 16: 119 papers 1 relevant (0.84%)
Topic 17: 103 papers 5 relevant (4.85%)
Topic 18: 778 papers 13 relevant (1.67%)
Topic 19: 316 papers 3 relevant (0.95%)
Topic 20: 865 papers 10 relevant (1.16%)
Total 5315 papers 108 relevant (2.03%)
Comments:
Many good people have audited 5315 papers, and came up with around 2% which
were useful, indicating they have wasted 98% of their time. We are just
coming to the realisation that there is not a lot of relevant, good quality
data out there (which is being re-stressed to us daily). Should we not be
spending our time creating more instead of summarising the little that’s
there?
Clinical bottom line:
Only kidding. Just spent 30 minutes of my weekend writing this one...
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