Did You Know
Understanding Health Research: A tool for making sense of health studies
Available at www.understandinghealthresearch.org - this tool guides you to review and interpret a pulished research paper, through a series of questions. Funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) UK, its evolution is well described in the website, and makes interesting reading.
The aims of the tool are to:
• Allow lay and professional audiences to understand how to assess the quality of research evidence
• Raise awareness of what evidence is and how it is generated
• Teach or reaffirm critical health literacy skills
Take a research paper that you have with you. Go to the site, and answer questions they ask, as you read the paper. At the end, guided by the steps, you would have understood the paper better than before!
News - Beall's list (predatory publishers and journals) - disappears
In the last few years the Beall's list - a list of predatory journals and publishers - maintained by a librarian from Denver USA, was referred to heavily, to understand how several journals were mushrooming under the guise of being Open Access, but were actually just making money and publishing mainly pseudoscience. There were arguments about the list - some claiming that Beall was going too far in his judgements, but majority found the list to be a major source to check out about journals. The list suddenly vanished from the blog!
