Medicine’s methodological debt to the social sciences

The editor of the James Lind Library, Iain Chalmers, invited us to document the origins of a 1988 paper, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in which we drew attention to the need to assess the methodological quality of medical review articles. Our paper was one of two such papers published in the general medical journals at that time, the other having been published a few months earlier by Cynthia Mulrow. Our 1988 article was based on work done by one of us who was a student at the time, supervised by the other, who was a faculty member, for a Master’s degree at McMaster University, Canada. Iain Chalmers suggested the interview format which follows, in which GHG, the faculty member, interviews ADO, the former student.