CLINICIANS’ ACCESS TO PEER-REVIEWED PROSTHETICS RESEARCH ARTICLES

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an important cornerstone of responsible clinical decision-making, and by extension, of high quality care provision in prosthetics and orthotics. However, many clinicians have been reluctant to embrace EBP, citing barriers such as high costs and time demands that are associated with obtaining pertinent published evidence for individual care scenarios. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to determine how accessible peer-reviewed research articles are to prosthetists who seek to implement EBP techniques into their clinical work without expending unreasonable amounts of time and money. METHODOLOGY: Two approaches were utilized. An academic approach entailed a search through five peer-reviewed research journals, including the Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics and Prosthetics and Orthotics International. A practical approach simulated a typical evidence search as it might occur in the field, using a number of different clinical questions to inform search terms in Google Scholar. The ratio of freely accessible articles was computed and compared for both approaches. FINDINGS: Out of a total of 796 prosthetics-relevant articles published in the analysed journals over the last years, 600 (75.4%) were found to be accessible to the public without any cost incurred. The practical approach showed that, among the top twenty search results for each search query, on average 40% to 75% of articles were freely available. CONCLUSIONS: A majority of pertinent research papers is already publicly available to anybody with internet access. Prosthetists would not be required to invest in journal subscriptions or have to spend time at an academic library to obtain these articles. However, it is a concern that evidence-based decision making may be flawed if not all literature on a topic is considered. There is still a substantial fraction of articles that are not freely available to practitioners, motivating a continued expansion of open-access policies in the field. LAYMAN’S ABSTRACT Medical care, including the provision of prostheses to people with limb loss, needs to be informed by scientific evidence. In order to reduce the risk of making decisions that are not ideal for a given patient and scenario, clinicians have to find out what the latest research on the topic suggests. While finding, reading, and appraising the published literature is an important aspect of Evidence Based Practice (EBP), it can be a time consuming task that interferes with the other duties of busy clinicians. Searching for literature over the internet can reduce the associated burden, as no physical copies of research articles have to be retrieved and stored anymore. However, not all research is freely available online, and accessing the full text versions of some papers can incur substantial fees. We wanted to find out how much of the scientific literature in the area of limb prosthetics is accessible free of charge on the internet. To that end, we first used the official websites of five established journals to search for prosthetics related articles and to check how many of them were free to read. Next, we used a search engine that is specialized in research articles (Google Scholar) to see how many of the offered search results point to full papers and how many are merely offering abstracts or otherwise abbreviated version of a full paper. Overall, we found that about 75% of research is freely accessible, which we believe to be sufficient for EBP in most cases. ARTICLE PDF LINK: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cpoj/article/view/30009/22881 How to cite: Burke J, Fiedler G. Clinicians’ Access To Peer-Reviewed Prosthetics Research Articles. Canadian Prosthetics & Orthotics Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1, No 3, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33137/cpoj.v1i1.3000