Articles of Interest
Supporting Health Care Workers to Address Misinformation on Social Media
Vineet M. Arora, M.D., M.A.P.P., Eve Bloomgarden, M.D., and Shikha Jain, M.D.
May 5, 2022
N Engl J Med 2022; 386:1683-1685
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2117180
"Although the spread of misinformation has escalated during the Covid-19 pandemic, the propagation of deceptive medical claims is as old as the health care profession itself. The ease with which misinformation and disinformation (inaccurate information that is purposefully misleading) are spread by means of social media, however, presents new and complex challenges. A recent survey found that 95% of people in the United States perceived misinformation to be a problem and 41% were very or extremely worried that they were personally exposed to misinformation."
Beyond Citation Rates: A Real-Time Impact Analysis of Health Professions Education Research Using Altmetrics
Maggio, Lauren, Meyer, Holly & Artino, Anthony. (2017). Beyond Citation Rates: A Real-Time Impact Analysis of Health Professions Education Research Using Altmetrics. Academic Medicine, 92, 1449-1455. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000001897.
"Traditionally researchers, including health professions education (HPE) investigators, have published research articles with the hope that colleagues will read and ultimately cite their work. In this dissemination model, citation counts are a measure of "scientific impact" and often rewarded in academia. However, citation-based metrics provide only a single view of a researcher's scientific impact, take years to accumulate, and may be poor indicators of practical impact in fields such as clinical medicine. Additionally, a citation-focused approach disregards calls from funders and the public for broader research dissemination outside academia. To meet this demand, stakeholders, including researchers, journals, and academic institutions, are sharing and promoting their research via alternative channels, such as news media, blogs, and social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. While this dissemination approach may help broadcast research discoveries, use of these alternative communication channels is not captured by traditional citation counts. Alternative metrics, or altmetrics, have been developed to complement traditional citation-based metrics and provide a summary of how research is shared and discussed online, including by the public."
Critical Appraisal of a Systematic Review: A Concise Review
Patel, J. , Hill, A. , Lee, Z. , Heyland, D. & Stoppe, C. (2022). Critical Appraisal of a Systematic Review: A Concise Review. Critical Care Medicine, 50 (9), 1371-1379. doi: 10.1097/CCM.0000000000005602.
DATA SYNTHESIS:
A systematic review is a review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant original research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. Critical appraisal methods address both the credibility (quality of conduct) and rate the confidence in the quality of summarized evidence from a systematic review. The A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews-2 tool is a widely used practical tool to appraise the conduct of a systematic review. Confidence in estimates of effect is determined by assessing for risk of bias, inconsistency of results, imprecision, indirectness of evidence, and publication bias.
CONCLUSIONS:
Systematic reviews are transparent and reproducible summaries of research and conclusions drawn from them are only as credible and reliable as their development process and the studies which form the systematic review. Applying evidence from a systematic review to patient care considers whether the results can be directly applied, whether all important outcomes have been considered, and if the benefits are worth potential harms and costs.
