The medical literature as a resource for health care practice

Evidence‐based medicine (EBM) is an approach to health care that promotes the collection, interpretation, and integration of valid, important and applicable patient‐reported, clinician‐observed, and research‐derived evidence. The best available evidence, moderated by patient circumstances and preferences, is applied to improve the quality of clinical judgments. The Health Information Research Unit of McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences in conjunction with others at McMaster and elsewhere has developed, evaluated, and made more accessible information tools to facilitate the practice of EBM. These include users' guides to the medical literature, strategies for improving the yield of MEDLINE searches, standardized formats for abstracts of journal articles and guidelines, new journals, systematic reviews and meta‐analyses, and software tools that bring high quality information to the point of clinical decision making. This article discusses these and other EBM resources for health care professionals. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.