Policy on Evidence Based Medicine
From My wiki
Contents |
Introduction
One of the advantages of a wiki, as opposed to a traditional journal or text, is the potential to verify sources instantaneously (as opposed to looking them up after you put down your book/magazine). We hope to incorporate this functionality into our wiki. Thus, we ask the following - for any statement that you make, please provide, at the very least, a citation in the following format: first author, journal, volume, first page, year of publication (ex. Mangano et. al. NEJM 333: 1750, 1995). Or, even better, you can add your article to our website and add a pop-up window for the abstract (see "preferred method for citations" below).
Plagiarism
Under no circumstances should information (text, images, etc.) be plagiarized from proprietary sources. Every effort should be made to identify the source of information (preferably the original source). In the case of freely available information (e.g. Creative Commons images) the appropriate attributions should still be made. For more information, see Plagiarism on WikiPedia
Minimum Requirements for Citations
First author, journal, volume, first page, year of publication (ex. Mangano et. al. NEJM 333: 1750, 1995)
Preferred Method for Citations
Our ultimate goals are for 1) each important article on this site to have its own wiki webpage, where readers and users can comment on the quality of the article and the meaning/applicability of the results and 2) to have the abstract of each article available as a popup window. Thus, if you cite an article with which you are familiar, we ask that you create a wiki page referencing that article, using the PubMed ID as its universal reference. We also ask that you consider creating a popup window (it's easy, see below).
For instance, if you cited Lee et. al.'s article on the use of the Mallampati scores to predict a difficult airway (the PubMed ID is 16717341) and were interested in adding it to our webpage, you would simply type http://www.openanesthesia.org/index.php?title=16717341 into your browser. If the article did not already exist on our site, you would then be prompted to create one (please adhere to our format, below). If the article did exist on our site, you would be directed to it, and therefore have the option of updating / commenting on the existing content. This strategy minimizes the possibility of duplicating work - no one will ever add an article that has already been added.
If you use our preferred method, we ask that you cite the article in the general text using the author's name followed by a link to the article (see below for code).
How to cite Lee et. al. in a wiki chapter: "Lee et. al. [[16717341]]" - the double brackets are MediaWiki's way of assigning an internal hyperlink.
Format for Adding Articles
We ask that, if adding an article, you use the following format (note that the first six items can be gleaned from PubMed, the seventh and eighth require that you have some familiarity with the article). Please see 16717341 as an example:
Reference: Title: Authors: Institution: Abstract: Pubmed ID: Pubmed Link: (include hyperlink here) Relevant Data / Source Information: ( Reader Comments:
Popup Windows
One of the problems with following up on references is that it takes time - we have solved this by adding the balloons extension to our wiki. This means that you can make a popup balloon for each article you site. To do so, simply type the following text into the wiki:
<balloon title="insert abstract text here" style="color:green">Lastname et. al. Journal Volume: Page, Year</balloon>
which looks like this: Lastname et. al. Journal Volume: Page, Year
NOTE: you cannot use less than or greater than signs (< >) in popup windows, nor can you use quotes, as these confuse the javascript. If the abstract you are displaying has these symbols, please remove them (otherwise it won't work). You can just write "less than" or "greater than" instead
Long-Term Goal
Our long-term goal is to develop a mechanism whereby articles can be automatically classified by various evidence-based medicine schema. Unfortunately, these schema change rapidly, and serve overlapping purposes. Thus, we intend to come up with a decision tree series of ~ 6-8 methodological questions (ex. prospective vs. retrospective, randomized vs. non, sufficiently powered, etc.), which will then automatically assign a level of evidence to each article based on all of the popularly used schema. For now, however, we will rely on your entries.
Another long-term goal of ours is to be able to award CME credit to physicians who add information (specifically, review articles) to our site. Stay tuned.....
