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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] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%