BMJ  2003;327:811 (4 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7418.811

Letter

Research was evidence based

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—We appreciate Fitzmaurice's agreement with us that expert based information sources cannot be trusted.¹ We take strong issue with his notion that our research design lacks rigour and is susceptible to bias.

A careful scanning of the complete version would reveal that, although we labelled the design as a convenience sample, we actually studied the complete population of review articles meeting our criteria. We called it a convenience sample because of the difficulties identifying review articles in the grey (unindexed) literature. As outlined in the methods section, our search was not completed by us but by a medical librarian (see acknowledgement).

Once the articles were identified, each article was reviewed for content separately and independently by two researchers who were blinded to the author, institution, and journal source. As a result of pre-testing and using strict criteria, our agreement was very high. We believe this methodology represents the . . . [Full text of this article]

Pinnacle Health System, 205 South Front Street, Harrisburg, PA 17104, USA ashaughnessy@PINNACLEHEALTH.org

University of Virginia Health System, Box 800729, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA

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