[Capacity for critical reading of clinical research among groups of medical residents].

OBJECTIVE

To explore the association of length of clinical training and ability to read critically clinical research papers in groups of residents of internal medicine.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

An instrument to evaluate critical reading was developed validated by four experts in clinical epidemiology. It contains four abstract from international medical journals. Each article was followed by 20 questions of false/true/ do not know options: 42 were interpretation items and 38 were judgement items. Each article had a semantic differential scale from 1 to 10 of global value of the paper. Seventy internal medicine residents participated: 20 in their first year of residency, 31 in the second year and 19 in the third year.

RESULTS

There were no differences between overall scores according to year of training (global median score of 22.5 out of 80 as a maximum). Globally the interpretation items reached a median of 22 versus 9 in the in the judgement items (p < 0.01). A tendency to underestimate the validity of the articles by the residents was observed, i.e. their overall validity was significantly lower than that of the experts (p < 0.001). Finally, there was a correlation of 0.45 between the scores in this study and those obtained during their medical studies.

CONCLUSION

These groups of residents were not influenced by length of their training during their internal medicine residency and their ability to judge clinical investigation papers.