Useful Resources

Current Awareness Resources

Many organisations create current awareness bulletins on a variety of topics. You can sign up for bulletins or news feeds

Amedeo
A large collection of healthcare eTOCs (online Tables of Contents from journals) sorted by speciality that allow you to tailor-make your own regular eTOC bulletin of relevant journals.

Alerts from Healthcare Databases 
You can create alerts from health care databases  advanced searches to receive updates on new content matching a specific row from a search strategy you’ve created. Alerts can be set to run at a number of frequency intervals, provide outputs in a number of formats and include differing levels of detail.

Kings Fund
Email updates on the activities, news and views of the Kings Fund as well as The King’s Fund Leadership Newsletter, Health Management and Policy Alert, Health and Wellbeing Boards Alert and The Integrated Care Bulletin.

NICE newsletters and alerts
News and alerts from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, including Surveillance report alerts, Medicines and prescribing alerts, Medicines and prescribing: important new evidence, Medicines awareness service, NICE News, Update for Primary Care and more.

NHS England Bulletins
Sign up to a range of email bulletins aimed at different groups of NHS and healthcare professionals. New Care Models Update bulletin, Chief Nursing Officer bulletin, Chief Scientific Officer bulletin, Learning Disability Update, Liaison and diversion bulletin, Specialised commissioning stakeholder newsletter and more.

READ by QxMD
You can use the app on your devices, set up emails and personalised alerts on the latest articles from the journals that interest you.

Transfusion Evidence Library Evidence Alert
The Transfusion Evidence Alert provides you with a monthly selection of the most important and newest publications around the world about blood transfusion and transfusion alternatives.

Health Knowledge – Finding and Appraising the Evidence modules 6 modules that take you through the process of how to find the evidence and then how to assess the validity and reliability of the published research.

Critical Appraisal Resources

Critical appraisal checklists help users to critically appraise articles and other sources of medical information. Below are some of the checklists created by different organisations. These checklists are usually tailored to specific types of article or studies such as Randomised Controlled Trials, Systematic reviews or Qualitative studies.

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) (Freely available)

Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) (Freely available)

BestBETS (Freely available)

Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) (Freely available)
Specifically for randomized controlled trials.

Appraisal of Guidelines Research and Evaluation (AGREE) (Freely available)
Specifically for clinical practice guidelines.

EQUATOR Network

Understanding Health Research (Freely available)
This website will guide you through a series of simple questions to help you to easily review and interpret a published health research paper.

SURE Critical Appraisal Checklists

Courses

Critically appraising the evidence base – elearning programme from eLfH  (use OpenAthens to login)

1. Introduction to critical appraisal  
2. Explanation about CASP toolkits 
3. Critical appraisal of a qualitative study
4. Critical appraisal of a quantitative study 

Critically Appraising the Evidence Base

Designed by Subject Matter Experts and HEE’s Technology Enhanced Learning Team, this series of online Critical Appraisal modules has been created specifically for healthcare colleagues

Open University – Medical Statistics (Free Online Course)

Calculators

CATmaker (Freely available)
CATmaker is downloadable software that is designed to aid critical appraisal. Users can create Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) for diagnosis, prognosis and aetiology/harm studies as well as systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials. CATmaker calculates useful clinical measures, such as relative risk reduction and number needed to treat, from information entered by the user and helps formulate clinical ‘bottom lines’.

Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (Freely available)
The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) website hosts various calculating tools for interpreting the clinical and statistical significance of data reported in clinical research, such as confidence intervals and hazard ratios.

Critically Appraised Articles

Published critical appraisals of journal articles, written by experts.  These provide exemplars of good practice in addition to providing evaluation an of the evidence.

ACP Journal Club 1991 – 1998, continued in the Annals of Internal Medicine 2008 – (use NHS OpenAthens)

Levels of Evidence

OCEBM – Levels of Evidence identifies levels of evidence from 1 -5 appropriate for particular types of question. The Levels of Evidence model is a reinterpretation of the Hierarchies of Evidence model, responding to criticisms that is was inflexible. The Hierarchies of Evidence model is typically represented as a pyramid.

Readings

These readings are available on the web. Some resources require an Open Athens account.

Aveyard, H., 2010. Doing A Literature Review In Health And Social Care: A Practical Guide. Open University.  [Accessed 27 June 2015]. Requires Open Athens account. See Chapter 5. How do I critically appraise the literature?

BMJ., [2015]. How to read a paper. BMJ Available from: http://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-readers/publications/how-read-paper [Accessed 27 June 2015]. A collection of articles in the BMJ that explain how to read and interpret different kinds of research papers.

Greenhalgh, T., 2014. How to read a paper. The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine. 5th ed. eBook. Chichester: Wiley.  Requires Open Athens account.

Sackett, D.L., Rosenberg, W.A., Gray, J.A., Haynes, R.B. & Richardson, W.S., 1996. Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. BMJ, 312(7023): 71–72. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2349778/.  The foundational article in evidence-based medicine, of which critical appraisal forms a part.

Referencing Resources

Mendeley Referencing Tool  –  Mendeley is a free tool allowing you to collect, manage, share and use references you find in the course of your research. You can run Mendeley on your computer or laptop, or as an app on your phone of tablet. You can create a free Mendeley account.  Go to www.mendeley.com  and click on Create a free account.

Harvard referencing – Staffordshire University guides and examples. A detailed guide to referencing many sources of information

Citing Medicine National Library of Medicine’s Style Guide for authors, editors, and publishers

Reference list and bibliography –  Link to Imperial CollegeLondon