The EBM journal’s “Purpose and procedures” page spells out our screening rules to check whether an article is sufficiently valid. Articles that meet the criteria go out for rating by our database of reviewers. We recently described the full process that involves over 160 journals, 60 000 articles per year, and a rating community of over 4000 clinicians.1

As we are always looking for ways to improve the process, we periodically review our procedures for selecting articles for the EBM journal. Recently, we revised our approach to aetiology articles: articles that look at the association between a predictive factor and an outcome. Sometimes those predictive factors are treatments, so there is a potential overlap with …