Evaluating Search Quality and Article Choice in Evidence-Based Medicine Assignments of Preclinical Students

This dataset accompanies an upcoming article. Background: This study aims to determine if the quality of literature searches is correlated with the quality of article selection in a whole-task Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) assignment for preclinical medical students. Case presentation: A capstone assignment was implemented for first-year medical students after a curriculum-integrated EBM course. In this assignment, students were given a clinical scenario and asked to report all EBM steps. For this project, we assessed their search strategy and article selection, which were scored using a rubric (1-4 scale). Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to assess the relationship between these two variables. Eighty-two students completed the assignment. Fifty-nine percent received a score of 3 for their search strategy, while 77% received a score of 4 for article selection. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was 0.19 (p-value = 0.086).