Document Type

Article

Department

Internal Medicine (East Africa)

Abstract

Navigating the online galaxy for up-to-date evidence-based knowledge in clinical neurology can be a challenge. Practical Neurology is a noted and popular online clinical resource,1 which according to its website is "…practical in the sense of being useful for everyone who sees neurological patients and who want to keep up to date, and safe, in managing them." As UK-based neurology trainees, we have been fortunate to have automatic access to Practical Neurology during our training. We found that the articles adequately covered most elements in our syllabus and were ideal reference material for our department. This accords with the recent readership survey: for almost 80% of readers, the journal impacts positively on their clinical work, contains reliable information and reflects real-life clinical neurology practice.2 Therein lay an opportunity to address the challenge of how to navigate online resources for high-standard reference material: that is, by using Practical Neurology as a standard knowledge base.

We set about arranging all the articles from the journal since its inception in 2001 into clinically focused sections, using the structure of our curriculum as an initial categorisation framework. We are grateful for the opportunity now to introduce and share our article-mapping project as an online resource with the readers of Practical Neurology: it is available as a reference table on the journal’s non-beta homepage (pn.bmj.com) under the ‘UK Curriculum’ section.

During the tabulation process, we excluded articles that were less relevant to clinical neurology, such as Book Club and ‘Carphology’. Articles selected by one neurology trainee were independently cross-checked by another trainee against the table of contents of the respective issue to ensure no relevant articles were missed. We tabulated the first author, title and year of final selected articles against the relevant curriculum item in an edited form of the 2010 syllabus, and categorised each as either ‘Review’ or ‘non-Review’. For example, ‘Powell 2012. Acute Symptomatic Seizures’ was tabulated as a ‘Review’ next to ‘Knowledge of the differential diagnosis of paroxysmal and transient events’ under item 2.6 ‘Epilepsy and Loss of Consciousness’ of the syllabus

Publication (Name of Journal)

Practical Neurology

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