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Introduction
Reading and appreciating medical literature is an important aspect of continuing medical education.1 Residents need to learn this important aspect during their training period.2–4 Evidence-based medicine involves updating, critiquing and using the evidence for patient care. It is the explicit use of the best available evidence combined with intuition of the clinician and the intentions of patients in a given clinical situation.5 To practice evidence-based medicine, it is important to analyse the literature critically. Journal club is an effective way to teach critical appraisal skills to residents.6 Use of journal clubs to impart training in evidence-based medicine has been demonstrated by various studies and also been shown to improve clinical care.7 ,8 Enormous data are published every day in medical literature. Critical appraisal of literature helps save lot of money and resources by delineating the facts.9 Reading and comprehending a journal article is an art in itself.10 The other aspect lies in how effectively the article can be presented to an audience.11 ,12 In the broad area of communication skills, this could be one of the important components that every postgraduate medical student must learn.13–15 There are large number of studies which discuss how to critically appraise an article, how to read and understand them.2 …
Footnotes
Contributors Both the authors have contributed and agreed on the content of the manuscript.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.