Lozano J M, Ruiz J G
Department of Pediatrics and Clinical Epidemiology, School of Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia.
Indian J Pediatr. 2000 Jan;67(1):55-62. doi: 10.1007/BF02802644.
Journal reading is an important continuing educational activity in terms of physician preference, frequency of use amount of time devoted to it and impact in changing practice. Clinicians trying to obtain information from journals face several tasks, including the need to assess both the quality and the applicability of the information found in published articles. This article describes the general principles for reading, critically, scientific papers that report clinical research results, which include establishing the kind of question that the authors were trying to answer, the type of study done, if the research design was appropriate for the question, and if it was conducted correctly. According to several available guidelines, once the reader has a clear idea of the study question it is necessary to assess the methods described by the authors in order to evaluate whether the research strategy used is likely to have errors resulting from bias and chance (random) variation. If the paper methodology seems to be adequate, the reader should proceed to determine the results of the article and their potential clinical impact. Finally, the reader must establish the extent to which the results are helpful in caring for his or her own patients, which means assessing the external validity and other related issues. The use of these strategies will improve the efficiency of readers for incorporating research results to their practice.
从医生的偏好、使用频率、投入的时间以及对改变临床实践的影响来看，阅读医学期刊是一项重要的继续医学教育活动。试图从期刊中获取信息的临床医生面临多项任务，包括评估已发表文章中信息的质量和适用性。本文介绍了批判性阅读报告临床研究结果的科学论文的一般原则，这些原则包括确定作者试图回答的问题类型、所开展的研究类型、研究设计是否适合该问题以及研究是否正确实施。根据一些现有指南，一旦读者清楚了解研究问题，就有必要评估作者描述的方法，以评估所采用的研究策略是否可能存在因偏倚和随机（偶然）变异导致的误差。如果论文方法似乎恰当，读者应进而确定文章的结果及其潜在的临床影响。最后，读者必须确定这些结果在照顾自己的患者方面有多大帮助，这意味着要评估外部效度及其他相关问题。运用这些策略将提高读者将研究结果应用于临床实践的效率。
