Improving medical literature sourcing by first-year medical students in problem-based learning: outcomes of early...

To describe and report outcomes of interventions implemented in the preclerkship curriculum at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to guide students toward use of high-quality information sources and build a foundation for developing fluency in applying primary medical literature to answer clinical questions.

The authors introduced three phases of change to instruction in literature searching and sourcing for beginning medical students writing learning issue essays: in phase 1 (2003-2006), students were introduced to online resources during orientation week and received a lecture on high-yield literature searching midway through their first curricular block; in phase 2 (2007-2008), the high-yield lecture shifted to orientation week, and a resource matrix and librarian-guided workshop on locating authoritative sources were added; and in phase 3 (2009), peer evaluation and collaboration were implemented. To track changes in sourcing skills, the authors analyzed 3,199 references from 665 essays written by 465 first-year students for two problem-based learning (PBL) cases during the first block of one representative year per phase (2006, 2008, 2009).

Over the study period, the authors found significantly increased citations to peer-reviewed journal articles and guidelines and decreased citations to general public Web sites and highly abstracted resources. Peer feedback and collaboration in phase 3 were associated with maintenance of these gains.

Early introduction of instruction on medical literature searching and sourcing, a librarian-guided workshop, and peer collaboration and feedback improved the quality of references cited by students in PBL essays during their first curricular block.