Please sir, can I have some MORE EBN?

Become a sentinel reader for MORE EBN (McMaster Online Rating of Evidence)

With the BMJ Publishing Group, the Health Information Research Unit at McMaster University (also the Editorial Office for Evidence-Based Nursing) produces bmjupdates. This free service provides a searchable database of the best evidence from the medical literature, pre-rated for methodological quality by research staff, who review every issue of over 100 clinical journals. Articles are then rated for clinical relevance and newsworthiness for each assigned clinical discipline by at least 3 members of a worldwide panel of practising physicians. The service also includes an e-mail alerting system in which users (primarily physicians in general practice or primary care or internal medicine and its subspecialties) are invited to register their interests so that they can receive e-mail alerts and searching access for literature that is matched to their personal clinical interests. You can check out bmjupdates+ at www.bmjupdates.com.

We are looking to expand bmjupdates+ to include relevance and newsworthiness ratings by practising nurses, and we would like you to join us as a sentinel reader (i.e., a nurse rater)!

What’s involved?

We will supply online articles according to your clinical interests, and you rate the articles on 2 simple scales. This takes about 2-10 minutes (depending on how interesting you find the article), and we can send you articles as often or as seldom as you like!

We’ll collate your ratings with those of at least 2 other nurses and use these ratings to choose the most relevant articles for Evidence-Based Nursing and other evidence-based information services (i.e., bmjupdates+) and to build a preliminary evidence-based database specifically for nurses.

And for your contribution, we will

• send you a yearly summary of your ratings to include in your professional practice portfolio. In the future, we will be applying for continuing education credits from major nursing organisations so that you can use this activity to obtain credits (where applicable);
• show you how other nurses in your specialty rated the same articles (Rating History);
• show you the highest rated articles in your clinical area (Stellar Articles).

If you are interested in joining us as a sentinel reader, please contact us at MOREebn@mcmaster.ca.

Donna Ciliska, RN, PhD
Co-Editor, Evidence-Based Nursing
Brian Haynes, MD, PhD
Coordinating Editor, Evidence-Based Journals