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Bulletin of the Medical Library Association logoLink to Bulletin of the Medical Library Association
. 1998 Jul;86(3):396–401.

Evidence-based practice.

K A McKibbon 1
PMCID: PMC226388  PMID: 9681176

Abstract

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is spreading in popularity in many health care disciplines. One of its main features is the reliance on the partnership among hard scientific evidence, clinical expertise, and individual patient needs and choices. Librarians play an important role in the spread of EBP because of the importance of identifying and retrieving appropriate literature from various sources for use in making health care decisions. This article gives an overview of how to search for therapy, diagnosis, etiology, and prognosis both for original studies and secondary publications such as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and clinical practice guidelines. Understanding how this research is done, how it is indexed, and how to retrieve the clinical evidence are an important set of skills that librarians can provide for clinicians interested in EBP.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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