PAS 6480: Evidence-Based Medicine

Welcome to the Research Guide for PAS 6480

On this guide you'll find EBM resources,such as:

• research articles in databases
• materials from the library on specific topics
• background info to help you learn about a topic when you start your research

This guide also suggests style guides and tools to help you cite and manage the sources you use in your research. Let me know if you have questions or need help with research. You can send me an email or schedule an appointment using the buttons in the box on the left-hand side of the page.

There are five resources mentioned in your textbook. Some can be accessed for free after registering, some are paywalled, but the library can always get you the information you need. Here are links, descriptions, and suggestions for those five highlighted resources:

• EvidenceAlerts: EvidenceAlerts is a joint project between McMasters University and DynaMed (a competitor to UpToDate). It is a repository of articles from over 120 journals and each article is rated by a team of reviewers for evidence quality and clinical relevance. You can also set up searches to be notified when new evidence is available on the topic of your choice. Registration is required and free of charge.
• Essential Evidence Plus: Essential Evidence Plus is a point-of-care tool. In addition to an UpToDate-like clinical care tool, it provides information from Cochrane, dermatological reference images, clinical calculators, drug information, and hierarchical rankings of evidence. Unfortunately, Elon does not have an institutional subscription. However, we do provide access to Cochrane, UpToDate, and ACCESSSS offers its own evidence hierarchy tools. If you are interested in other features available through EEP, please contact the library to see what options might be available to you.
• Ovid's Evidence-based Medicine Review: Like Essential Evidence Plus, Evidence-based Medicine Review from Ovid is a subscription-based EBM collection. It pulls information from Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Clinical Answers, and a number of publicly available resources including ACP Journal Club and the NHS' Health Technology Assessments. While Elon does not have a subscription to Evidence-based Medicine Review, the library provides access to the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and can get access to any article you need from their journal collection. 
• ACP Journal Club: A project of the American College of Physicians, the ACP Journal Club is a monthly feature in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. Each month, one article from over 120 major medical journals is selected by an editorial staff as the ACP Journal Club feature. The feature includes an editorial; a curated, in-depth abstract; and a bibliography of supplementary and complementary articles. The featured article is always made publicly available and Elon will provide access to any of the related articles you might need.
• ACCESSSS: Another service supported by McMasters University, ACCESSSS allows you to comb through multiple sources simultaneously to find evidence for clinical decision making. ACCESSSS will organize the information it finds into a hierarchy, placing the strongest level of evidence it the top. Registration is free, but Elon does not have an institutional account (i.e., select "None" under "library" option). As a reminder, please do not purchase any articles you find in ACCESSSS; we may already have the article in our collection and if not, we will get it for you at no charge.