The biomedical literature is a major challenge for college students. Their exposure often comes with little instruction or structured practice in analysis and evaluation. We investigated the extent of data available on the explicit teaching of critical analysis to college students using primary biomedical literature. Therefore, we performed a systematic review following PRISMA guidelines and searched various databases (PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, and SCOPUS) for studies published from the date of the database inception through the date the search was performed. Our search initially identified 97 total articles, of which eight met the inclusion criteria for reporting explicit instructional methods for critical analysis of the literature and for reported student outcomes. Additional searches of citations from these eight papers resulted in nine more studies that met our criteria for a final total of 17 articles. Our results showed that all included studies reported a statistically significant increase in students' ability to analyze and interpret primary literature following an intervention of explicit instruction. However, the studies varied in both assessment tools and instructional duration. In conclusion, a growing body of evidence supports the effectiveness of explicit critical thinking instruction to enhance student engagement with the primary literature. Future research should focus on standardizing assessment metrics and determining optimal instructional delivery methods within the biomedical sciences curriculum. No external funding was received for this project. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Swiger et al. (2026) studied this question.