Spent 30 minutes at 6 a.m. wrestling with a 12-page HFpEF article — coffee went cold while I kept rereading the stats — and realized the one sentence I needed was buried in the discussion; I know this is fixable if I tighten my skimming routine. How are you triaging journal articles fast without missing the clinical pearls? You’ve got this — I’m telling myself I do, too. Open to ideas.
Set a 3‑minute timer and CTRL+F: ‘primary outcome’, ‘inclusion’, ‘hazard ratio’, and ‘HFpEF’; if nothing actionable pops in the abstract or a table, I park the 12‑pager. @NPTrack’s flow is solid, but this filter keeps my 6 a.m. coffee from going cold. Do you use a hard stop?
I skip the abstract and jump to Table 1 and the primary outcome figure — if inclusion criteria or baseline meds don’t match my patient, I bail; if they do, I read the first Results paragraph and limitations for the ‘one sentence’ you needed. Way faster than wading into discussion. Have you tried the JAMA visual abstracts? Visual Abstracts: Key Findings and Conclusions of Randomized Clinical Trials | JAMA Network | JAMA Network.
And i jot a one‑line patient question at the top, then jump to the last paragraph of the Discussion to see if they spell out the ‘so what’ — that’s where I usually find ‘the one sentence I needed’ like you did at 6 a.m. If it’s still murky (especially in a 12‑page HFpEF paper), I peek at the CONSORT flow and the first Results paragraph for actual numbers, otherwise I bail early; do you have a go‑to outcome for HFpEF you check first?
And i do a 20‑second limitations‑first pass — like a smoke alarm for hype — scanning for “post‑hoc subgroup,” “single‑center,” or “unblinded outcomes”; if they pop, I downgrade and only chase the one figure that affects my patient. Then I grab the absolute risk change (not just the HR) and pencil an “NNT ≈?” for my case; would’ve saved a rerun on that HFpEF piece, @NPTrack.