Objects The center of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) in China has organized several extra-curricular trainings in summer vacations for medical students, so as to enable them get involved in the practice of Evidence Based Medicine, we were wondering whether these training courses served as an effective supplement to EBM education in class and what it exactly brought to us, with a primary concern about research capability in field of EBM. Methods We conducted questionnaire survey with undergraduate students whose enrolling years range from 2001 to 2005 in West China Medical School of Sichuan University, and divided them into a stratification of five groups according to enrolling years. Then we paired the trained students with untrained ones at a ratio of 1?2. The final number of included students was 216, of which 72 had been trained while other 144 had not. Epidata 3.0, Excel and SPSS 13.0 were used for data collecting and analyzing, respectively. Chi-square test was adopted for result interpretation. Results Compared to those without training experience, trained students were prone to choose medical specialized databases (Plt;0.05) when they search for some academic publications. In terms of selecting and quality evaluation, the trained were more dependent on systematic reviews (Plt;0.05). Meanwhile, they also showed critical thinking more than that of untrained (Plt;0.05). In addition, the fruit of published theses was in favor of those trained ones. Conclusions Those who have taken part in extra-curricular training of EBM surpass those untrained in ability of scientific research. To some extent, we are still in shortage of educational resources; this extra-curricular training course can play a complementary role for EBM education, as effective and necessary.
