Quality issues in reviews written by medical postgraduate students: investigation and countermeasures / 中华医学教育探索杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the quality issues in medical reviews written by medical postgraduate students, and to provide a reference for improving the quality of medical reviews written by such students.Methods:A total of 141 medical reviews written by the medical postgraduate students from various affiliated hospitals of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine from 2018 to 2022 were collected, and the quality of these medical reviews was evaluated in terms of topic selection and writing expression skills. As for topic selection, a self-designed innovative questionnaire (hereinafter referred to as topic questionnaire) was used to collect the evaluation of external experts, and as for writing expression, the reviews were assessed based on the criteria in relevant literature from the aspects of the outline of the review, the timeliness of references, analysis and evaluation, and the quality of the text. EPIDATA 3.2 was used to input data, and SPSS 20.0 was used for the chi-square test.Results:A total of 135 (96%, 135/141) valid questionnaires were collected in this study, and the results showed that 70% (94/135) of the review topics lacked novelty. The assessment of writing skills showed that 95% (128/135) of the reviews had outdated references, and 68% (92/135) lacked focus, hierarchy or logic in outline, which accounted for a higher proportion than the reviews with analysis and evaluation issues (59%, 80/135) and text quality issues (61%, 83/135) ( P<0.05). Conclusion:There are many quality issues in the medical reviews written by medical postgraduate students, such as a lack of novelty in topic selection and low overall quality of outlines. In order to improve the abilities of scientific research among medical postgraduate students, universities and supervisors should strengthen the guidance of innovative thinking in topic selection and enhance the training of writing expression skills, such as scientific analysis and logic.