Bradley 2002
Methods	C-RCT. Follow up of professionals: DONE Blinded assessment: UNCLEAR Overall protection against bias: MODERATE
Participants	10 residents in a neonatal intensive care unit. Country: USA.
Interventions	Real-time librarian instruction about EBM searching (during one month) + educational material. Control.
Outcomes	Search strategy, perceptions, satisfaction and opinion about use of MEDLINE
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases (MEDLINE).
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Yes	A - Adequate
Cabell 2001
Methods	C-RCT. Follow-up of professionals: DONE. Blinded assessment: DONE. Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	48 residents in a university hospital-based internal medicine training program. Country: USA.
Interventions	One-hour didactic session + use of well-built clinical question cards + practical sessions in clinical question building. Control.
Outcomes	Use of library information system: number of log-ons, time spent searching, total searching volume, abstracts viewed, and full-text articles viewed
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases (MEDLINE). Data missed to perform effect size calculation.
Risk of bias
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	B - Unclear
Cheng 2003
Methods	RCT. Follow-up of professionals: NOT DONE. Blinded assessment: UNCLEAR. Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	800 hospital clinicians. Country: Hong Kong (China).
Interventions	Three-hour training workshop (with supervised hands-on practice). Control.
Outcomes	Clinical question formulation, awareness, knowledge, confidence and use of databases, attitude towards the use of electronic information services, searching skills
Notes	Type of Technology: Internet, electronic databases
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Yes	A - Adequate
Erickson 1998
Methods	RCT. Follow-up of professionals: NOT DONE. Blinded assessment: DONE. Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	31 obstetrics and gynecology residents training at an academic medical centre. Country: USA.
Interventions	One-hour individual tutorial on MEDLINE with hands-on instruction: resident performing the searches. One-hour individual tutorial with all searching conducted by the instructor. Control.
Outcomes	MEDLINE search frequency, duration, recall, precision and searcher satisfaction
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases (MEDLINE).
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Yes	A - Adequate
Haynes 1991
Methods	RCT. Follow-up of professionals: DONE (for main outcomes). Blinded assessment: DONE (for main outcomes). Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	59 physicians and physicians-in-training of a teaching hospital. Country: Canada.
Interventions	Introducing user fees for MEDLINE searching in clinical settings (pay group). Continue searching without charge (no pay group).
Outcomes	Frequency and quality (number of citations per search, search recall, precision) of MEDLINE searching; effect on decision
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases (MEDLINE).
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	B - Unclear
Haynes 1993
Methods	RCT. Follow-up of professionals: UNCLEAR. Blinded assessment: DONE (for main outcomes). Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	308 physicians and physicians-in-training from 6 departments of a teaching hospital. Country: Canada.
Interventions	Before randomisation: 2 hours of basic training. Access to a clinical perceptor experienced in MEDLINE searching + audit & feedback about search quality from a study librarian. Control.
Outcomes	Nb of searches, search performance (nb relevant citations, precision, recall), cost and time/session, perception of searches worth and other perceptions
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases (MEDLINE).
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	B - Unclear
Haynes 2006
Methods	C-RCT. Follow-up of professionals: DONE (for relevant outcomes). Blinded assessment: DONE (for main outcomes). Overall protection against bias: HIGH.
Participants	203 physicians in a relatively sparsely populated area. Country: Canada.
Interventions	Access to a full-serve version (of an existing digital library): included discipline-specific alerts to new articles and database of accumulated alerts. A self-serve version: included a passive guide to evidence-based literature
Outcomes	Utilisation of the service, utility, use of relevant evidence-based information, clinical usefulness
Notes	Type of Technology: electronic databases, email for alerts.
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Yes	A - Adequate
Katz 2003
Methods	RCT. Follow-up of professionals: DONE. Blinded assessment: NOT DONE (for main outcomes). Unit of analysis error. Overall protection against bias: LOW.
Participants	98 physicians and residents in 2 university-affiliated primary care centers. Country: USA.
Interventions	Access to a Triage-based email system promoted to the patients of intervention physicians (by cards given during clinic visits + flyers mailed + automatic response to each email). Control (no access to this triage-based email system).
Outcomes	Patient email use, phone calls, and visit distribution by physician; attitude about communication (physician and patient)
Notes	Type of Technology: email for provider-patient communication
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	B - Unclear
Magrabi 2007
Methods	C-RCT. Follow-up of professionals: DONE (for relevant outcome). Blinded assessment: DONE. Overall protection against bias: MODERATE.
Participants	227 physicians (general practice) from across Australia. Country: Australia.
Interventions	Advanced online training which provided additional guidance to answer clinical questions. Control (standard tutorial).
Outcomes	Frequency of system use (associated with training); other outcomes not relevant here
Notes	Type of technology: Online evidence retrieval system.
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	B - Unclear
Simon 2005
Methods	ITS. Methodology quality: good. 5 criteria: DONE. 3 criteria: NOT CLEAR.
Participants	12 primary care internal medicine residents. Country: USA.
Interventions	Residents were encouraged to access the Internet to obtain audit and feedback on their practice, with accompanying pertinent educational material (through a personal letter + a face-to face meeting)
Outcomes	Proportion of residents who accessed their profiles and change following the intervention in the proportion of patients whose care followed national guidelines
Notes	Type of Technology: Internet for audit and feedback.
Risk of bias
Item	Authors’ judgement	Description
Allocation concealment?	Unclear	D - Not used

Allocation concealment: A - Adequate B - Unclear C - Inadequate D - Not used