How to...interpret the orthodontic literature.

Abstract

In a previous article in this series, Bickley and Harrison discuss the issue of searching for evidence.1 Within dentistry alone, there are around 500 journals publishing over 43,000 research articles a year. Given that a large proportion of these papers are of limited relevance to everyday practice and may be of poor quality, how do you know which of these articles you should read to inform your practice and which you can disregard? In this article we aim to provide information on how you can appraise the research to identify articles that are both of a high quality and relevant to our clinical practice. Most published papers appearing in the medical and dental journals follow the IMRAD format (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion).2 Published papers will often begin with an abstract that summarizes the key elements from each section. It is very tempting, when reading a paper of interest, to focus on the abstract and the results or the conclusions of the study. However, to decide whether a paper is truly worth reading, attention should be given primarily to the methods section to establish whether the study design was appropriate and valid. Consideration should then be given to what the paper says (the results of the study) and whether it helps your clinical practice (the relevance, or applicability, of the paper).3