Easy access to clinical practice guidelines

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 66, No. 1, January February 2024, Page 25 College Library

The College Library has updated our clinical practice guidelines web page (www.cpsbc.ca/registrants/library/clinical-practice-guidelines) to curate current sources of clinical practice guidelines and ensure they are easy to find and use.

CPG Infobase, a key directory of Canadian practice guidelines, is no longer available (as of 1 December 2023). BC Guidelines and Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) guidelines are still available. A new addition is the Guidelines International Network’s International Guidelines Library, which includes Canadian, US, and UK guidelines. Filters may be used to locate guidelines in English and to sort by country of origin. Here are other new sources that may be used to quickly search for disease-focused guidelines:

BMJ Best Practice and DynaMed have links to guidelines included in each disease module.

ClinicalKey includes a guidelines search.

College librarians have created a guidelines-specific search in Medline (Pub-Med). A link is provided on the Library’s clinical practice guidelines web page.

The Turning Research Into Practice (TRIP) database is also a new addition to the clinical practice guidelines web page. It is free to search and easy to limit search results to guidelines. Once citations have been found, some full-text content may be available for direct download, and more can always be requested from the Library.

As always, registrants may ask the Library to search for a current guideline on any topic. If you would like to request a search or suggest a source not currently included on the clinical practice guidelines web page, contact the Library at www.cpsbc.ca/registrants/library/make-request.
—Paula Osachoff
Librarian

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This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

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Paula Osachoff. Easy access to clinical practice guidelines. BCMJ, Vol. 66, No. 1, January, February, 2024, Page(s) 25 - College Library.



Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

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