As an ardent fan of the Centre for EBM (along with 110,000 others if
the home page statistics are anything to go by) I just want to
instigate a brief debate about the format of CATS as exemplified on
their pages:
http://163.1.212.5/cats/allcats.html
In the case of "single article evidence digests" exemplified by ACP Journal
Club, EBM, EBN, EBHP&M, EBMH etcetera there is a convention in the
use of indicative titles:
i.e. if it is a REVIEW (and therefore generalisable) the indicative
title reads: Domestos kills all known germs (i.e. in the present
tense)
if it is the result of a TRIAL (and therefore subject to more
possible spatial, temporal or geographic qualification) the
indicative title reads : Domestos killed all known germs (i.e. in the
past tense).
I point this out because even now I am surprised how even some hardened
EB practitioners are unaware of this distinction - which I find a very
useful operational one. However this convention does not seem to be the case
with CATs where we have a number of titles for CATS (based on trials) that
use the present tense and therefore imply more generalisability.
Am I being ultra picky here or do list members agree that it would be useful for
the distinction being made in the evidence based literature to extend
to the more "home-made" products of the otherwise excellent CAT-maker?
I acknowledge this is something of a hobby-horse with me - I have
thought for sometime that the Cochrane review titles should also be
indicative (to catch clinicians' attention) with the more prosaic
current title being relegated to sub-title. However in the light of
recent albumin discussions I appreciate the danger of oversimplifying
messages.
I do, of course appreciate that there is more than one way to skin a
CAT and apologise if I have hurt anyone's felines.
Andrew Booth
Andrew Booth BA MSc Dip Lib ALA
Director of Information Resources
School of Health & Related Research (ScHARR)
Regent Court
30 Regent Street
SHEFFIELD
S1 4DA
Tel: 0114 222 5420 or 5214 Fax: 0114 272 4095
WWW: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/R-Z/scharr/ir/andrew.html
[log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|