A search of PUBMED, BIDS and MEDLINE was conducted by Ian Eiloart, the researcher on the project.
PUBMED includes MEDLINE, PREMEDLINE, and other articles from Journals that
provide full bibliographical information to Pubmed. around 3,900 current
biomedical journals are indexed. A fuller description is available at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/overview.html
``MeSH is a vocabulary of medical and scientific terms assigned to documents in PubMed by a team of experts. These terms can be used in many cases to search PubMed more efficiently than simple text words.''
BIDS ISI indexes 7,500 journals in 3 databases. They do not say how many of them are indexed in the Science Citation Index.
Two on-line databases were searched for articles relevant to the study. PUBMED, which includes the MEDLINE database, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ indexes current biomedical journals, and was searched for articles published Sept 1988 - Sept 1998 with this search term:
(MeSH term: "Education, Medical, Graduate")
and (text word: "competence")
BIDS ISI Science Citation Index, a UK general science index, http://www.bids.ac.uk/ was searched for articles published 1981 - Sept 1998 for these terms:
(word in title, keywords or abstract: ("graduate" or "postgraduate"))
and (word in title, keywords or abstract: ("medical education")
In addition, the contents of Academic Medicine and the British Medical Journal were monitored as they came to publication throughout the period of the study.
The results of each search were then combined with our personal databases of references in professional (including medical) education and development and information technology.
Each search yielded in excess of 500 hits (many were duplicated), which were then examined (by Ian Eiloart) on the basis of title and (where available) abstract for their relevance to the current project.
Additional articles were then found with searches on author names, where an author had published on the psychology of learning in Graduate Medical Education and via backwards citation searches.
Following this, Ian Eiloart and ourselves sorted the remaining articles into education topics and medical specialisms, which were labelled:
aspects of judgement and competence; assessment; clinical experience; Information Technology; output measures; policy; supervision and feedback; teaching methods; theory anaesthesia; dentistry; general practice; general medicine; obs & gyn; psychiatry; radiology; surgery
Some articles were judged to be of peripheral interest, and are listed in our database although they did not form a part of the study. Others were judged to be irrelevant, for one of a variety of reasons, including that the material was:
This paper cites about 390 articles, leaving a further 470 uncited article citations in the database. Thus in all there are about 860 article citations in the wider database.
