Evidence-Based Medicine will look familiar to readers of ACP Journal Club, upon which it is modeled. According to its statement of purpose, Evidence-Based Medicine is designed to "alert clinicians to important advances in internal medicine, general and family practice, surgery, psychiatry, paediatrics, and obstetrics and gynaecology by selecting from the biomedical literature those original and review articles whose results are most likely to be both true and useful." Selection according to tough, explicit criteria for quality of the evidence is the key to this undertaking. The editors then transform the information in the original articles into synoptic "value-added abstracts" and solicit concise comment by clinical experts [3]. The internal medicine material is selected from ACP Journal Club.

Several things about the first issue are striking. First, it is both refreshing and exciting to see the best of the work being done in a broad range of clinical disciplines. Our daily work in medicine tends to be primarily in single fields, and we inevitably become parochial in our outlook; a widening of professional horizons can only be healthy. Second, this first issue includes a systematic review on the effectiveness of inpatient stroke care units [4]. It is one of the first such reviews outside obstetrics to emerge from the Cochrane Collaboration pipeline, and its publication marks an important step in the development of this unique international effort in clinical scholarship. Evidence-Based Medicine intends to publish many Cochrane reviews as they appear; the first issue also contains a brief summary of the philosophy and methods of the Collaboration [5]. Third, Evidence-Based Medicine itself is strikingly international in character. Edited in both Hamilton, Ontario, and Oxford, England, printed both in Philadelphia and in London, and distributed worldwide through a joint publishing effort of the American College of Physicians and the BMJ Publishing Group, the publication brings the concept of a medical global village that much closer to reality.

Most importantly, however, Evidence-Based Medicine delivers what it promises: the best of the evidence. The print materials of the past, by themselves, have not had a distinguished track record in improving the quality of clinical practice, one of the principal reasons being a healthy skepticism about the nature and quality of that published information: Today's black-and-white certainty has so often become tomorrow's gray historical curiosity. To the extent the published evidence of the future is strong enough to "speak for itself," however, print materials may become the effective force they should be in the delivery of high-quality medical care. For such reasons, seeing the first copy of Evidence-Based Medicine brings to mind Lincoln Steffens' optimism of 60 years ago: "I've been over into the future, and it works."