I used Google.com to search for blogs. The selected blog, Library Link, is maintained by the staff of the Moody Medical Library. According to their website, the blog is concerned with tracking the trends in technology information, scholarly publication, and library service. I chose the blog because it talks about topics of interest to medical librarians (open access journals, etc.) and because it also may contain useful information for academic and public librarians. It also contains various links that may be of interest to medical librarians, such as the link to the Open Access Now website, which campaigns for the freedom of research information. I chose the following excerpt since it explains what evidence-based medicine (ebm) is and what it is about, which is the topic (ebm) chosen for this blog.
Excerpt is chosen from the LibraryLink: Evidence Based Medicine/Practice webpage located here: http://blog.utmb.edu/abienkow/?page_id=161 :
Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is the name given to a relatively new direction in medical thinking and action. EBM has as its mainstay the principle that health care providers actively investigate which of the various diagnostic and therapeutic measures they apply actually work. They should do this by reviewing claims of efficacy through critical analysis of the biological rationale and experimental justification (”the evidence”) of whatever intervention is under consideration. The “evidence” is to be found in the clinical research literature, so the practice of EBM requires a certain facility in retrieving this material. It also presupposes the ability to evaluate clinical research literature effectively, and to separate stronger studies from weak ones. In turn, this skill requires some degree of mathematical competence, especially in basic statistics. It also implies a working knowledge of the elements constituting a strong study, and something that perhaps is best called “practical logic”, that is, the ability to ask the right questions at the right time.
