Spotlight on mentoring undergraduate medical students using evidence-based medicine

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is currently used for patient management and to draw up recommendations. However, the effectiveness of EBM-related teaching during the mentoring of undergraduate medical students has not been widely evaluated. In this work, we aimed to (1) review published articles on EBM-related teaching during undergraduate clinical rotations and (2) to investigate the effectiveness of the EBM mentoring strategies used.

We performed a structured narrative review of articles or abstracts published in English up to January, 2026 focused on the application of EBM during undergraduate clinical rotations, and indexed in Pubmed, Sciencedirect and Scopus databases. Publications were screened using a combination of four 'key terms': evidence-based medicine, EBM, undergraduate medical students and clinical rotation.

Almost all retrieved publications reported positive outcomes following EBM approaches or courses implemented during clinical rotations.

We identified several factors related to EBM mentoring that can influence the learning process of medical students (knowledge, skills, attitudes…) during clinical rotations. Including EBM in the undergraduate curriculum improved evidence-based practices and was found to be highly effective. Only 19 of the 188,859 initially retrieved publications met the inclusion criteria and were incorporated in this review.

EBM improves instruction and tutoring during undergraduate clinical rotations; it strengthens critical thinking and often opens up additional perspectives, enabling progress. EBM should be included in undergraduate medical curricula and rotations, worldwide.