PREVENTION+

PREVENTION+

About This Site


PREVENTION+ is sponsored by The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) and powered by the Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, building on the McMaster Premium Literature Service, McMasterPLUSTM

PREVENTION+ is a continuously updated repository of current best evidence from research to support preventive health care decisions.

All articles from over 120 premier health care journals, including American Journal of Preventive Medicine and Preventive Medicine are assessed for their methodologic quality by research staff, indexed to content related to disease and disability prevention, then rated for health care relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 health professionals practicing in the discipline. Only the strongest studies and systematic reviews are selected for PREVENTION+; less than 1 in 10 published articles makes the grade.

PREVENTION+ does not cover basic science, and is providing relevant new evidence about prevention and health promotion to health professionals more than a comprehensive literature database for researchers.



What are the features of PREVENTION+?

The current features of PREVENTION+ include:

  • selection of articles by expert research staff and front-line health professionals concerning the cause, prediction, treatment, quality improvement and health economics to protect, promote, and maintain health and well-being and to prevent disease, disability, and death
  • e-mail alerts about new evidence. Each alert includes McMaster Online Rating of Evidence (MORETM) health care ratings and comments, and electronic links to the article's abstract via PubMed (if available) and fulltext article via PubMed or the publisher's site (if available for free)
  • a cumulative searchable database of articles that is continuously updated (from mid-2003 forward)
  • a search interface to access relevant information in the accumulating database
  • evidence-based search strategies for MEDLINE to supplement searches in the cumulated PLUS database when needed
  • download options for citation management
  • links to evidence-based resources


What do the health care ratings in PREVENTION+ mean?

The current features of PLUS include:

  • systematic review of over 120 journals (including all Cochrane reviews) with selection of articles by expert research staff concerning the cause, prediction, treatment, quality improvement and health economics to protect, promote, and maintain health and well-being and to prevent disease, disability, and death, according to explicit criteria, with high reproducibility and periodic quality assurance checks*
  • ratings of each eligible article for health care relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners for each discipline for which the article might be pertinent

* Wilczynski NL, McKibbon KA, Haynes RB. Enhancing retrieval of best evidence for health care from bibliographic databases: calibration of the hand search of the literature. Medinfo. 2001;10(Pt 1):390-3.