Evidence Doesn’t Start with Results: A New Cochrane Protocol Is a Wake-Up Call on Why Search Skills Are Crucial

Evidence Doesn’t Start with Results: A New Cochrane Protocol Is a Wake-Up Call on Why Search Skills Are Crucial

Search Skills Matter We talk a lot about evidence-based practice, but far less about the skill that makes it possible in the first place: finding the evidence. A newly published Cochrane protocol examining educational interventions for literature searching sends a clear message—searching skills matter, and gaps in training persist across health professions Not All Searches Are the Same A key message from the Cochrane protocol is that not all searches serve the same purpose—a distinction often described as precision versus recall, but rarely explained to health professionals. Searching for precision aims to find a small number of highly relevant papers…
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Why QMed’s teachings matter even more in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Why QMed’s teachings matter even more in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is everywhere now. Students use it. Faculty use it. Researchers use it. In othe words - AI in literature searching for health research is here to stay Increasingly, we hear something like: “I asked AI to find articles for my topic — it gave me everything I need.” That’s the moment when Team QMed quietly raises its eyebrows.You say, “But AI gave me a list of references!”Our eyebrows stay raised. You continue, “It even summarized them! This saved so much time.”Our eyebrows go a little higher.We say:Think again — could something have gone wrong in this process? Did you…
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Finding Related Research and Identifying a Research Gap:  Try “Connected Papers”

Finding Related Research and Identifying a Research Gap: Try “Connected Papers”

Short Summary Many researchers search PubMed to find articles on a topic, but few know how to visually map related research and identify gaps. In this post, I explore a real example using my paper on searching PubMed in radiology — and demonstrate how a tool like Connected Papers can help researchers refine or choose a research topic by finding related research or identifying research gaps or both! Why This Topic Matters When we publish, we often wonder: Who else has written something similar? Has the topic evolved? Is there a gap I can explore further?Traditional searching gives us a…
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