This series was borne of a long-held desire of the new Editor-in-Chief of PM&R and her former resident (R.A. S.) to improve the ability of rehabilitation providers to apply evidence-based practice principles to patient care, research, and peer review. In short, we are passionate about evidence-based practice and think that every rehabilitation clinician should learn it. And we are not aloneevidence-based practice is a content area on the United States Medical Licensing Examination. 1 The Journal of the American Medical Association recently released a set of Core Competencies in Evidence-Based Practice for Health Professionals. 2 We know from our experience in learning and teaching evidence-based practice that (1) it takes time, teaching by experts, and frequent supervised application to become proficient; (2) the key knowledge base is often undertaught or under-reviewed in undergraduate and graduate clinical education (across all health care fields); (3) learning evidence-based practice is a lifelong pursuit; and (4) translation of evidence-based practice methods to rehabilitation questions can have additional challenges.
The Mission of the Methodology Matters SeriesThe mission of the Methodology Matters series is to educate rehabilitation physicians and allied rehabilitation clinicians, researchers, and peer reviewers in the principles and application of evidence-based practice using rehabilitation examples.
Objectives of the Methodology Matters SeriesOur primary objective is to help our readersrehabilitation physicians and allied rehabilitation clinicians-"read a paper." In other words, we want to help clinicians critically appraise, or independently evaluate and interpret, the primary literature evidence base for clinical practice. We also aim to help clinicians apply other principles of evidence-based practice, such as to understand and interpret summarized evidence (systematic reviews, clinical practice guidelines) and interpret diagnostic tests. We do not expect all rehabilitation clinicians to become experts in epidemiology and biostatistics, but to help them maximize their potential as clinicians by increasing their knowledge of evidencebased practice. Our secondary objectives are to help rehabilitation researchers, peer reviewers, and editors understand evidence-based practice principles as applied to study design, interpretation and presentation of results, writing and organization of a manuscript, and critical appraisal of a manuscript.
Overview of the Methodology Matters SeriesIn this feature, we give a brief overview of the history of evidence-based practice and the role of two related fields, epidemiology and biostatistics. We discuss the epidemiologic approach to asking questions about human health outcomes, which is also the framework for evidence-based practice. The JAMA Core Competencies in Evidence-Based Practice will form the foundational content for the Methodology Matters series. 2 We routinely link to vocabulary and content from other key evidence-based practice, critical appraisal, and cli...