Full Text Evidence Based Medicine Resources

Several resources to assist you with practicing evidence-based health care are available through the Health Sciences Library.

Full-Text Resources

ACP Journal Club
ACP Journal Club consists of the full text of ACP Journal Club (from the American College of Physicians) and Evidence-Based Medicine (a joint publication with the British Medical Journal Group). The editors of ACP Journal Club screen the top clinical journals on a regular basis and identify studies that are both methodologically sound and clinically relevant. They write an enhanced abstract of the chosen articles and provide a commentary on the value of the article for clinical practice.

The Cochrane Collaboration's Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews includes the full text of the regularly updated systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare prepared by The Cochrane Collaboration. You will find two types of reviews: Complete Reviews (regularly updated reviews of a topic or common clinical question); and Protocols (reviews currently being prepared). The Cochrane Database is produced by the Cochrane Collaboration - an international network of individuals and institutions committed to preparing, maintaining, and disseminating systematic reviews of the effects of health care.

The Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects(DARE)
DARE is a full-text database containing critical assessments of systematic reviews from a variety of medical journals. DARE is produced by the expert reviewers and information staff of the National Health Services' Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York, England, and consists of structured abstracts of systematic reviews from all over the world. DARE records cover topics such as diagnosis, prevention, rehabilitation, screening, and treatment.

There are two ways to use these excellent resources. The first is to limit to these resources while searching Medline. Go to the Health Sciences Website. At the Quick Links drop down menu, select Medline through Ovid. Run your search as usual. Select the Limit icon. You will find several EBM limits:

Evidence-Based Medicine Reviews - will restrict your retrieval to those articles or studies that have been reviewed by the Cochrane Collaboration (when creating a Topic Review), the ACP Journal Club, or Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE).

EBMR Reviews - will limit your results to articles that have been reviewed in the ACP Journal Club, or DARE only.

Limits for each of the EBM databases-Cochrane, ACP Journal Club, or DARE. This will limit your search to articles that have been reviewed in each specific database. By their inclusion in these publications, these studies have met strict Evidence-Based Medicine criteria.

The second way to access these full-text databases is by using them directly. Go to the Health Sciences Library Website, click on the Quick Links drop down menu, and then select Multiple Ovid Databases. You will see the screen shown here on the right with several options. You can choose to search all three databases simultaneously by checking in the box next to EBM Reviews Full Text. Or each of the EBM full-text databases individually by checking the box next to ACP Journal Club, Cochrane Database, or DARE. You will search these databases generally using keywords or article title words.