Scientific journals and evidence: What does the future hold?

Objectives:
To challenge participants to consider what the ideal journal should be doing in 10 years’ time to provide reliable and truly usable evidence to help them improve health.

Description: 

  • Introduction (5 minutes).
  • Exercise 1 (10 minutes): Participants, in groups of 2-4 people, will discuss and list their four greatest frustrations with finding evidence they can actually use to inform their management of health problems.
  • Feedback to full group from exercise 1 (5 minutes).
  • Presentation (15 minutes): Trish Groves will explore how the future of evidence dissemination might look, and the possible role of journals, focusing on:

○       the need to tackle research waste and make published studies and data more relevant, useful, usable and reusable for clinicians, patients, service providers and policy makers.

○       who needs (or will pay for) journals if readers really only want bite-sized, free information at the point of care?

○       what types of research will readers want or need over the next decade?

■      how will they differentiate objective evidence from conflicted or fake news?

■      will ‘big data’ and evidence become more aligned?

■      where will ‘real-world evidence’ and evidence for precision medicine fit in?

  • Presentation (15 mins): Christine Laine will discuss how journals can handle living evidence. He will focus on:

○       living (continuously updated) and digital systematic reviews and guidelines

○       how the nature of evidence may change over the next decade

○       how journals can help make clinical practice guidelines more useful, reliable, trustworthy, timely, while reflecting clinical uncertainty

  • Exercise 2 (20 minutes): participants will break into groups of up to 8 people to answer these questions:

○       will journals that publish original research evidence be needed at all in 10 years?

○       what are the two most important things that journals will have to do to remain relevant sources of ‘evidence’?

  • Feedback to full group from exercise 2 (10 minutes).
  • Discussion and conclusions (10 minutes).

Facilitators: 

Target audience: 

Clinicians, patients, and others needing usable, timely health research evidence. Basic and intermediate levels.

Type of session: 

-

Date: 

Saturday 16 September 2017 - 11:00 to 12:30

Location: