How Ratings Are Used

The rating system supports an Internet-based alerting system and "best evidence" database of links to original articles and systematic reviews to help doctors in a wide and expanding range of clinical disciplines keep up to date with the medical literature. We use the ratings to help us select articles that are most interesting to raters and readers.

The rating system has several “perks” for raters:

1. we send only articles that have passed our criteria for scientific merit (Inclusion Criteria);
2. we provide raters with scores from other raters for the same articles (Rating History);
3. we arrange for CME credits in North America (CME Credit Details);
4. we provide the highest rated articles to all raters in a given discipline (Stellar Articles).

Ratings are used to prepare evidence-based journals and texts, including:

• ACP Journal Club ACP Journal Club PLUS, and PIER for the American College of Physicians;
• Evidence-Based Medicine and EvidenceUpdates+ and Clinical Evidence for the BMJ Publishing Group;
• Medscape Best Evidence Alerts for WebMD
• Knowledge Translation+
• nursing+
• OBESITY+ and PRE-OBESITY+ for the Canadian Obesity Network

EvidenceUpdates+, Medscape Best Evidence Alerts, Knowledge Translation+ (KT+), nursing+, OBESITY+, and PRE-OBESITY+, are free services to which all can subscribe. ACP JournalWise and PIER are membership benefits from the American College of Physicians, and Clinical Evidence and Evidence-Based Medicine are membership benefits from the BMJ Publishing Group.