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The BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine Journal was launched in 1995, with the purpose of alerting clinicians to important advances in medicine, by selecting original articles and reviews whose results were most likely to be both accurate and useful.1
When the Journal was launched, about 10 500 randomised trials were indexed on PubMed. Identifying the trials that affect practice has become harder: 20 years later, over 30 000 trials are published annually. If we focused purely on systematic reviews, we would face similar problems: over 19 000 systematic reviews were indexed on PubMed in 2017. Identifying the evidence that matters, keeping up to date and applying evidence in practice is a significant challenge for busy clinicians.
As a result, we as a journal have set out to identify, and focus on, the research evidence that provides definitive conclusions and research that confirms, refutes or improves current practice.
We have focused on two questions: (1) does this research apply to the patients we see in practice? and (2) what difference could this evidence make to my patient? In doing so, we can remove a substantial amount of research that does not matter. Much of it does not include patients typically seen in clinical practice, …
Footnotes
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests CH is the Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), University of Oxford. He has received expenses and fees for his media work and holds grant funding from the NIHR, the NIHR School of Primary Care Research and The NIHR Oxford BRC. CEBM, part of the at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (NDPHCS), jointly runs the Evidence Live Conference with the BMJ and the Overdiagnosis Conference with some international partners which are based on a non-profit model. JB runs the search engine the Trip Database (www.tripdatabase.com) and owns 50% of the shares in the company and is an Associate Editor at BMJ EBM. KRM is an Associate Professor at CEBM, University of Oxford, receives funding from the NIHR SPCR Evidence Synthesis Working Group and the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme and is an Associate Editor at BMJ EBM. JOS is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. His Fellowship is funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is an Associate Editor of BMJ EBM. JA is a is a clinical pharmacologist at CEBM, University of Oxford. He is also president emeritus of the British Pharmacological Society and an Associate Editor at BMJ EBM.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.