BEME in the media

The Best Evidence Medical Collaboration (BEME) has increasingly appeared in both the peer reviewed and grey literature since its inception. As the completed reviews continue to appear, the number of papers citing BEME reviews (as well as other papers) continues to grow. In August 2006 a measure of this was taken and is summarized in the following sections. Full details of 49 papers are available on request.

Peer-Reviewed Literature
A search was conducted across the key databases relevant to medical education. This included: Medline, Embase, CINAHL, ERIC, PsychInfo, HMIC and EBM databases. There were 116 unique papers that were either BEME reviews or guides (7), or discussed BEME as a central or supporting topic.

Cited References
BEME reviews, and papers discussing BEME, are continuing to be cited at an increasing rate. There is no precise way to measure a number of cited references, but databases that do measure this (eg Science Citation Index) point to this expansion in citation. Journals citing BEME papers include The British Medical Journal, JAMA, Academic Medicine, Medical Education, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Grey Literature
A web search is a quick and fairly comprehensive way to check the extent of a topic appearing in the grey (non-commercial) literature. A search was devised to find web pages that mentioned BEME, but filtered out pages that contained the letters “beme” that did not concern the work of the Collaboration. A total of 11, 800 unique web pages refer to the work of the BEME Collaboration.