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Dear All, Greetings from Colindale in London (Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre) where I am attending a two day course and this is the lunch time. and thought I could join in the on going discussion. It is heartening to see that plenty of resources are available locally, nationally and internationally and people who fund these, those who provide them and the users are all geared up to the task. This discussion list has given an opportunity to share the ideas and thoughts around these areas Just a little note on abstracts as they will be commonly looked at least in the initial satages of searching for evidence. Verbeek JH, van Dijk FJ, Malmivaara A, Hulshof CT, Rasanen K, Kankaanpaa EE, Mukala K. Evidence-based medicine for occupational health. Scand J Work Environ Health 2002 Jun;28(3):197-204 In occupational health "With the use of the abstracts only, most clinical questions could be answered satisfactorily, but concrete risk estimates were often lacking. The lack of availability of full text journals decreased the reliability of the critical appraisal and risk estimation". Pitkin RM, Branagan MA, Burmeister LF. Accuracy of data in abstracts of published research articles. JAMA 1999 Mar 24-31;281(12):1110-1 The authors studied articles published in V5 journals and CMAJ. "Data in the abstract that are inconsistent with or absent from the article's body are common, even in large-circulation general medical journals". They even performed a RCT to see whether educational intervention will improve the quality of abstracts. "Pitkin RM, Branagan MA. Can the accuracy of abstracts be improved by providing specific instructions? A randomized controlled trial. JAMA 1998 Jul 15;280(3):267-9 Defects in abstracts, particularly inconsistencies between abstract and body and the presentation of data in abstract but not in body, occur frequently. Specific instructions to authors who are revising their manuscripts are ineffective in lowering this rate. Journals should include in their editing processes specific and detailed attention to abstracts". In Psychology Harris AH, Standard S, Brunning JL, Casey SL, Goldberg JH, Oliver L, Ito K, Marshall JM. The accuracy of abstracts in psychology journals. J Psychol 2002 Mar;136(2):141-8 "Abstracts accompanying 13% of a random sample of 400 research articles published in 8 American Psychological Association journals during 1997 and 1998 contained data or claims inconsistent with or missing from the body of the article". Also the recently reported FUTON bias might be relevent here. I should confess that I have only looked at the abstracts of the above papers and not the full text. More over I have not critically appraised them as the post lunch session will start any minute. Cheers & regards, Badri Dr.P.Badrinath M.D,M.Phil,(Epid)PhD(Cantab)DFPHM,MPH(Distinc) Specialist Registrar in PHM & Honorary Clinical Lecturer, Suffolk Public Health Network & University of Cambridge, PO Box 170, St.Clement's Hospital, Ipswich IP1 4LA, UK. http://myprofile.cos.com/badrishanthi _________________________________________________________________ Broadband? Dial-up? Get reliable MSN Internet Access. http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/default.asp