Meaningful research during medical school can be difficult, but if you like journal club and care about evidence quality then our work might be a good fit.

Our ‘Evidence Appraisal Working Group’ is researching evidence appraisals in scientific discussion. We think journal comments, journal clubs, and online commentary by clinicians and researchers are a rich source of information about trial importance, quality, and appropriate interpretation and use. We are working to make this data more available and usable to help the research system better approach evidence dissemination, synthesis, and adoption.

Right now we have projects that will both describe what ‘evidence appraisals’ are out there and also will help build a more structured dataset of appraisals for future use. Members of our working group are examining journal comments, finding specific ‘appraisals’ (e.g. “this COPD trial only examined mortality, neglecting dyspnea”), and working to develop a new vocabulary for labeling these appraisal concepts that can be applied in more general fashion, regardless of disease or intervention being studied (e.g. “outcome set neglected important disease-specific quality of life measure”).

A few practicalities:

We can tailor this for an elective period project, as a summer research project, or as something done part-time during a stretch of lighter months.

We have existing data ready for review now, but this is ongoing.

We can work with you to make sure your set of comments is relevant to your long-term career goals.

If you also participate in manuscript drafting or review then publication is likely.

At the very least, you can put ‘Evidence Appraisal Working Group’ on your CV

Interested? Please fill this out: https://goo.gl/forms/RsRPJIbPUKHnIzSu1

See our presentation here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14vxAxLPN0GScG_8cf72YBJuW8950M5hhGa6HnyWUZjs/edit?usp=sharing

See our published review and research agenda: https://academic.oup.com/jamia/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jamia/ocx050/3852310/Evidence-appraisal-a-scoping-review-conceptual?redirectedFrom=fulltext