Development and pilot testing of a tool to assess evidence-based practice skills among French general practitioners.

BACKGROUND: There is currently an absence of valid and relevant instruments to evaluate how Evidence-based Practice (EBP) training improves, beyond knowledge, physicians' skills. Our aim was to develop and test a tool to assess physicians' EBP skills. METHODS: The tool we developed includes four parts to assess the necessary skills for applying EBP steps: clinical question formulation; literature search; critical appraisal of literature; synthesis and decision making. We evaluated content and face validity, then tested applicability of the tool and whether external observers could reliably use it to assess acquired skills. We estimated Kappa coefficients to measure concordance between raters. RESULTS: Twelve general practice (GP) residents and eleven GP teachers from the University of Bordeaux, France, were asked to: formulate four clinical questions (diagnostic, prognosis, treatment, and aetiology) from a proposed clinical vignette, find articles or guidelines to answer four relevant provided questions, analyse an original article answering one of these questions, synthesize knowledge from provided synopses, and decide about the four clinical questions. Concordance between two external raters was excellent for their assessment of participants' appraisal of the significance of article results (K = 0.83), and good for assessment of the formulation of a diagnostic question (K = 0.76), PubMed/Medline (K = 0.71) or guideline (K = 0.67) search, and of appraisal of methodological validity of articles (K = 0.68). CONCLUSIONS: Our tool allows an in-depth analysis of EBP skills, thus could supplement existing instruments focused on knowledge or specific EBP step. The actual usefulness of such tools to improve care and population health remains to be evaluated.

Reuse of termino-ontological resources and text corpora for building a multilingual domain ontology: an application to Alzheimer's disease.

Ontologies are useful tools for sharing and exchanging knowledge. However ontology construction is complex and often time consuming. In this paper, we present a method for building a bilingual domain ontology from textual and termino-ontological resources intended for semantic annotation and information retrieval of textual documents. This method combines two approaches: ontology learning from texts and the reuse of existing terminological resources. It consists of four steps: (i) term extraction from domain specific corpora (in French and English) using textual analysis tools, (ii) clustering of terms into concepts organized according to the UMLS Metathesaurus, (iii) ontology enrichment through the alignment of French and English terms using parallel corpora and the integration of new concepts, (iv) refinement and validation of results by domain experts. These validated results are formalized into a domain ontology dedicated to Alzheimer's disease and related syndromes which is available online (http://lesim.isped.u-bordeaux2.fr/SemBiP/ressources/ontoAD.owl). The latter currently includes 5765 concepts linked by 7499 taxonomic relationships and 10,889 non-taxonomic relationships. Among these results, 439 concepts absent from the UMLS were created and 608 new synonymous French terms were added. The proposed method is sufficiently flexible to be applied to other domains.

[PubMed 2009. How to work with the new "advanced search" interface]. / PubMed 2009. La nouvelle interface de recherche avancée (Advanced search).

PubMed/MEDLINE has recently changed the interface of its search function, especially the new web page called "Advanced Search", which combines on one page many of the functionalities and search options previous located at several different access points. We present here a tutorial to help French-speaking users work with this new interface.

[MEDLINE and PubMed 2006. Presentation and instructions for use]. / MEDLINE et PubMed 2006. Présentation et mode d'emploi.

The aim of this paper is to provide a practical kit in French for bibliographic retrieval using MEDLINE on PubMed new version, a World Wide Web retrieval service. We explain screen by screen how this bibliographic research tool works and try to make it easy to use to every single French-speaking end-user.

[Free access to full text. How to work with PubMed Central]. / Accès gratuit au texte intégral avec PMCTM. PubMed CentralTM. Présentation et mode d'emploi.

Direct and free online access to relevant scientific information and full text papers is the daily concern of researchers, whatever their "documentary environment", even more so if it is not easy. The PubMed Central (PMC) data base is one of the solutions offered to those who work in the field of Health and Life sciences. This short teachware presented here is a practical help, in French, designed to show how to use PMC for bibliographic retrieval and free full text access.

[How to search National Library of Medicine databases. NLM Gateway: [presentation and method of use (update: May 15, 2002)]. / Les bases de données bibliographiques internationales étrangères. NLM Gateway: présentation et mode d'emploi (dernière mise à jour: 15 mai 2002)

The aim of this paper is to provide a practical kit in French for bibliographic retrieval using NLM Gateway, a Web-based retrieval service that lets users search simultaneously in multiple National Library of Medicine databases and information resources. We try to explain screen by screen, how this bibliographic retrieval tool works and try to make it easy to use to every single French-speaking end-user.