Grant: Operating Grant

The projects in this proposal are part of a series of studies seeking ways to improve retrieval and dissemination of scientifically sound and clinically relevant studies, especially to answer this question: What are the current best treatments or diagnostic tests for a given health problem?. The retrieval studies in the project focus on the large, general, medical literature databases such as MEDLINE. The purposes of the search filters developed for use in these large databases are 1) to assist clinicians to do their own searches; 2) to help reviewers of published evidence retrieve all relevant citations; and 3) to provide resources for librarians to help clinicians construct their own searches. Improved search filters are highly important given the problems of indexing and retrieval in large databases, and the widespread and rapidly increasing direct use of these databases by clinicians, patients, the public, researchers, educators, lawyers, and journalists, whose interests are primarily directed towards a small subset of the research literature that is of most direct relevance to the management of health care problems. Our dissemination projects focus on developing and testing systems for the delivery of best research evidence to clinicians. Our long-term objective is to harness the most clinically relevant content to test effects on clinical practice - a target of several objectives in this proposal. The questions in this proposal are related to determining the robustness of the search filters we have already developed and that are currently in use in PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE; developing search filters to retrieve other types of studies; developing and testing more efficient and effective methods of disseminating the most clinically important research evidence to practitioners; and comparing these approaches with the current, exhaustive and expensive methods for research evidence retrieval, appraisal, and synthesis in practice guidelines.