LCME (the Liaison Committee on Medical Education) states that medical students need to develop skills in: "independent identification, analysis, and synthesis of relevant information, and appraisal of the credibility of information sources."
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Information Literacy is the ability to locate, analyze and use information to meet a need. GEAR is a helpful acronym to learn and remember each step:
This resource guide is based on materials created by Northern Kentucky University librarians for their Quality Enhancement Plan titled GEAR Up with Information Literacy.
There are numerous types of information sources - from books and peer review articles to podcasts and social media posts. Choose the best source to meet your information need.
The library provides access to thousands of ebooks, ejournals, and databases. Most of these CANNOT be accessed with Google or ChatGPT. To ensure that you are accessing high quality journals and ebooks it is BEST PRACTICE to go straight to the library's subscription databases.
Popular Health Sciences Databases include:
If you are trying to answer a clinical question, it can be helpful to use the Evidence Pyramid. Use your question type to identify the recommended study type. If this study type is unavailable move up or down the pyramid as necessary.
Clinical Question Types:
All information is not equal nor of the same quality. Therefore it is necessary to evaluate it. Evaluating information can range from basic to in depth. The higher the quality of evidence that is needed the more in-depth of an analysis should be used. For example:
There are a variety of tools to evaluate or appraise information. Select the from the options below the tool that best fits your information type:
Once you have gathered and evaluated the information - it is time to determine how best to apply or to utilize the information.
This includes:
Using a synthesis table can help to gather and organize the pertinent information from each source.
Source 1 (Author & Date) | Source 2 (Author & Date) | Source 3 (Author & Date) | Source 4 (Author & Date) | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Theme 1 | ||||
Theme 2 | ||||
Theme 3 |
*Enter notes in the cells that indicate how each source provides insight on each identified theme.
When using information that you did not create, you need to give credit to the creators. Not giving credit is commonly known as plagiarism.
UC's Student Code of Conduct defines plagiarism as:
Citation managers help you to organize your information sources, correctly cite these within your research or document, easily create bibliographies, and hopefully reduce the chances of plagiarism.
Style Guides: these resources help you to accurately and correctly cite your sources.
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