Medical Professionals’ Usage and Preference of EBM Resources: A Survey

A survey was undertaken to study how the medical professionals of clinical departments of Kasturba Medical College (KMC), Manipal, utilize the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) resources provided by the KMC Health Sciences Library, Manipal and to identify their preferred EBM resources. A questionnaire survey was carried out to collect the information. From 74 respondents, 20 were medical faculty and 54 were pursuing postgraduate courses in different medical subject areas in clinical departments. The questionnaire was designed to collect demographic details of participants, general information regarding the usage of EBM resources and the factors leading for the selection of the most preferred EBM resource. A large segment of the participants were familiar with the EBM resources available in the library and few of them were also familiar with EBM resources available through other sources. The data on the pattern of EBM resources utilization revealed that PubMed was the resource accessed daily by the most number of faculty and UpToDate by Postgraduate (PG) students. The most preferred EBM resource by both faculty and PG students was UpToDate. The details of the data analysis, results and the major findings are presented in this article.