Bibliographic search training for evidence-based management education: A review of relevant literatures

While evidence-based management training is a recent addition to management education, there is a longer history of teaching and studying evidence-based instruction in the domain of medicine. We review relevant literatures from information sciences and medical education to examine the lessons learned and explore how they can inform the design and practice of evidence-based management education. We focus our review specifically on bibliographic search training because searching academic literatures to locate the best available research evidence is central to the practice of evidence-based management. Research shows that searchers often have great difficulty developing effective search strategies and retrieving relevant information from electronic databases. Despite wide variation in research designs and training programs, studies examining the effectiveness of bibliographic search training show that training typically enhances search quality. Although the extant research is informative, on its own it provides insufficient guidance for the design of bibliographic search training. Therefore, we use a combination of our findings from the literature reviewed and Goodman and O'Brien's (2012) evidence-based instructional strategies to develop a set of recommendations for designing bibliographic search training for evidence-based management education. We also provide suggestions for future research intended to yield more precise instructional design recommendations.