The purpose of Evidence-Based Medicine is to alert clinicians to important advances in internal medicine, general and family practice, surgery, psychiatry, paediatrics, and obstetrics and gynaecology by selecting from the biomedical literature those original and review articles whose results are most likely to be both true and useful. These articles are summarised in value-added abstracts and commented on by clinical experts. The author of the original article is given an opportunity to review the abstract and commentary before publication.

The procedures we follow to achieve this purpose are

• Detecting, using prestated criteria, the best original and review articles on the cause, course, diagnosis, prevention, treatment, quality of care, or economics of disorders in the foregoing fields

• Introducing these articles with declarative titles and summarising them accurately in structured abstracts that describe their objectives, methods, results, and conclusions

• Adding brief, highly expert commentaries to place each of these summaries in its …