Knowledge Management: How to Keep up With the Literature

With the increasing medical literature, staying current with medical information is becoming a major challenge for clinicians. To ensure best practice and treatment for patients, clinicians must access medical information, acquire new knowledge, and achieve information mastery in their field. Without a systematic approach to identify and critically appraise clinical research, they might become dependent on inappropriate or outdated information. In this review, we present a brief synopsis of the multitude of resources available to clinicians for knowledge management, our best-practice suggestions for selecting an evidence-based medicine resource, and a convenient overview and easily adaptable strategy to successfully identify relevant medical literature and evaluate its validity. For rapid retrieval, review, and synthesis of the medical literature, we recommend the systematic approach of retrieve, review, reject, and read. This strategy allows clinicians to more efficiently stay abreast of the medical literature and more effectively translate the best evidence from peer-reviewed publication to patient.

Abbreviations used in this paper: CI, confidence interval, MEDLINE, Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, MeSH, Medical Subject Headings