Systematic Online Academic Resource (SOAR) Review: Renal and Genitourinary

Online resources for emergency medicine (EM) trainees and physicians have variable quality and inconsistent coverage of core topics. In this first entry of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Systematic Online Academic Resource (SOAR) series, we describe the application of a systematic methodology to comprehensively identify, collate, and curate online content for topic-specific modules.

A list of module topics and related terms was generated from the American Board of Emergency Medicine's Model of the Clinical Practice of Emergency Medicine. The authors selected "renal and genitourinary" for the first module, which contained 35 terms; all MeSH headers and colloquial synonyms related to the topic and related terms were searched both within the 100 most impactful online educational websites per the Social Media Index and the FOAMsearch.net search engine. Duplicate entries, journal articles, images, and archives were excluded. The quality of each article was rated using the revised METRIQ (rMETRIQ) score.

The search yielded 13,058 online resources. After 12,717 items were excluded, 341 underwent quality assessment. All renal/genitourinary topics were covered by at least one resource. The median rMETRIQ score was 11 of 21 (interquartile range = 8-14). Calculus of urinary tract was most prominently featured with 60 posts. Thirty-four posts (10% of full-text screened FOAM articles) covering 12 core topics were identified as high quality (rMETRIQ ≥ 16).

We demonstrated the feasibility of systematically identifying and curating FOAM resources for a specific EM topic and identified an overrepresentation of some subtopics. This curated list of resources may guide trainees, teacher recommendations, and resource producers. Further entries in the series will address other topics relevant to EM.