Search

Digital learning and self-assessment tools have gained importance in medical education over the last years and are pushing back print media more and more. They enable flexible learning that is aligned with current state exams and the latest scientific findings. Embedded videos, interactive graphics and practice questions offer a more diverse learning experience than using books alone. While the commercial learning tools cover the state examinations' content well, they often lack what is additionally taught in different faculties. At the same time, the dominance of a few providers is tied to rising costs for students or to provide campus licenses. Faculties may thus offer literature and learning platforms of less variety, and an intensive and broad examination of subjects and problems is made more difficult. The promotion and nationwide availability of locally initiated non-commercial learning and examination tools can counteract this development. Electronic learning platforms enable efficient exam preparation with the presentation of exam questions. Paper-based preparatory exams have already been almost completely replaced by their electronic counterparts. Digital exams offer decisive advantages over paper-based exams, for example with the embedding of video sequences and increased feasibility of sequential questions, and should become standard not only in exam preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the American company OpenAI released the pre-release version of its chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, a lively discussion has arisen about the benefits and use of speech AI in our society. Since its release ChatGPT has already fundamentally changed the understanding of written texts and it will continue to do so. This has sparked a debate about the use and impact of language AI in higher education. The potential applications of ChatGPT in higher education range from assistance with teaching and learning, to automation of routine tasks, to conversion and programming work. In the paper, examples from the medical library sector will demonstrate the power but also the limitations of ChatGPT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, different types of reviews evolved with different objectives. In a summary, 48 review types were identified, which were grouped into seven "review families" with regard to their underlyin g o bjectives and their literature search methods. Among these, the "Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis" (FMRS) approach was not considered. The aim of our short paper is to introduce FMRS as a potential further member of a review family and to highlight its methodological characteristics, potentials, and challenges. FMRS can be used for exploration and focused description of a wide range of topics, but especially fo r a s-pects of knowledge production, i.e., methodological and theoretical issues. A specific search in PubMed and medRxiv revealed nine publi-cations on FMRS between 2016 and 2022, the majority of which addressed research practice as the object of investigation, rather than topics of clinical research. The inclusion of the FMRS in a review family would be welcome due to the peculiarities of the systematisation of literature search within the approach of FMRS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the quality of literature searches and their updating and adaptation require careful, comprehensive and transparent documentation. Guidelines exist for documenting the development and progress of a literature search. However, the authors are not aware of an editable template that can be used to document the literature search. Therefore, this paper aims to present a search template for the systematic and transparent development and documentation of a comprehensive literature search. The template includes essential steps of the database search as well as supplementary search options and offers a possibility for methodical and content-related justification of the included steps. It considers current guidelines for reporting search strategies. The search template is provided free of charge and is editable with common text editing programs. The contents are to be adapted according to the individual search strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]