Many thanks to the faculty and fellows who attended GI Journal Club in October.
Mike Heacock presented a paper published in the BMJ on how to read a paper, How to read a paper: Assessing the methodological quality of published papers.
There are five key questions to keep in mind:
- How does the paper add to the current medical knowledge?
- How is the population defined, and how does this population relate to your population of interest?
- Was the study sensible?
- What sort of bias may be contained in the paper? In particular, use caution with non-randomized intervention trials.
- Was assessment blinded? This point came up several times as we discussed the other articles in journal club.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and don’t forget to check back in next week for the links to the November articles. Our next GI Journal Club will be Tuesday, November 29th, 2011.
