Friday 11 April 2008

Evidence-based Dentistry Internet Guide updated

Prompted by several enquiries of the last fortnight from fourth year Dentistry students (BDent4) undergoing their PEARLS I have updated the Evidence-based Dentistry Internet guide. You can find more information about PEARLS at The Faculty of Medicine Evidence-based Medicine program site, but basically it is an activity where students are tasked with identifying a question that has arisen out of a clinical situation, formulating an answerable question, developing a search strategy and conducting a search with the aim of identifying a quality research article. They then appraise the article and present it to their staff and their peers.

The EBD guide now contains links to relevant organisations which have information about evidence-based dentistry, links to University of Sydney databases which have EBD content, as well as several other databases and tools, and an excellent set of online guides and tutorials from both the University of Sydney and from universities in the United States.

One tutorial I recently added is from the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, on the subject of Formulating your questions using PICO. This is just one of a series of tutorials, most of which focus on using the new OvidSP interface.