The field of nicotine addiction and tobacco cessation is constantly changing. Every month, scientific journals publish the results of studies evaluating the effect of new interventions and medications to help tobacco users quit. Competent tobacco cessation specialists must keep up-to-date with new discoveries and recommendations. Nevertheless, not all of what is published in medical journals should make you change what you currently do to help your clients quit.

Screening Tobacco Cessation Literature

Stay up-to-date:

• As a Treatment Specialist, know your field and keep up-to-date with the scientific literature.
  
  
• Deciding if current cessation practices need to be improved involves accurately assessing scientific information.

Identify reliable information sources:

• Reliable information is essential to evaluate whether or not a cessation intervention is effective.
  
  
• Use Medline to link to scientific journals. Some of the major journals will email their current table of contents upon request. For example: The New England Journal of Medicine

Research Reliability Checklist

• The ability to screen research studies to determine scientific value is an important part of a Treatment Specialist's skills. This task is simplified by use of the Research Reliability Checklist.
  
  
• Use the Key Terms links to look up words and phrases used in the Research Reliability Checklist.

Key Terms:

Biochemical methods to verify abstinence
Confidence interval
Consistent with other studies
Double-blind study
Drop-out/attrition rate
Evaluation
Follow-up measurements
Meta-analysis
Peer-reviewed journals
Randomized clinical trial
Similar control and experiment groups
Study population similar to target population
Statistically significant results
Tobacco cessation intervention

The Research Reliability Checklist is based on criteria established by the panel of experts who developed the recently published the Public Health Service Clinical Practice Guideline (Fiore et al., 2000).