Net improvement of correct answers to therapy questions after pubmed searches: pre/post comparison.
BACKGROUND
Clinicians search PubMed for answers to clinical questions although it is time consuming and not always successful.


OBJECTIVE
To determine if PubMed used with its Clinical Queries feature to filter results based on study quality would improve search success (more correct answers to clinical questions related to therapy).


METHODS
We invited 528 primary care physicians to participate, 143 (27.1%) consented, and 111 (21.0% of the total and 77.6% of those who consented) completed the study. Participants answered 14 yes/no therapy questions and were given 4 of these (2 originally answered correctly and 2 originally answered incorrectly) to search using either the PubMed main screen or PubMed Clinical Queries narrow therapy filter via a purpose-built system with identical search screens. Participants also picked 3 of the first 20 retrieved citations that best addressed each question. They were then asked to re-answer the original 14 questions.


RESULTS
We found no statistically significant differences in the rates of correct or incorrect answers using the PubMed main screen or PubMed Clinical Queries. The rate of correct answers increased from 50.0% to 61.4% (95% CI 55.0%-67.8%) for the PubMed main screen searches and from 50.0% to 59.1% (95% CI 52.6%-65.6%) for Clinical Queries searches. These net absolute increases of 11.4% and 9.1%, respectively, included previously correct answers changing to incorrect at a rate of 9.5% (95% CI 5.6%-13.4%) for PubMed main screen searches and 9.1% (95% CI 5.3%-12.9%) for Clinical Queries searches, combined with increases in the rate of being correct of 20.5% (95% CI 15.2%-25.8%) for PubMed main screen searches and 17.7% (95% CI 12.7%-22.7%) for Clinical Queries searches.


CONCLUSIONS
PubMed can assist clinicians answering clinical questions with an approximately 10% absolute rate of improvement in correct answers. This small increase includes more correct answers partially offset by a decrease in previously correct answers.
McMaster University, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Health Information Research Unit, Hamilton, ON, Canada. mckib@mcmaster.ca.
Kathleen Ann
KA
McKibbon
Cynthia
C
Lokker
Arun
A
Keepanasseril
Nancy L
NL
Wilczynski
R Brian
RB
Haynes
D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D039781:PubMed
Internet; Medline; information services; information storage and retrieval; physicians; primary health care