ArticleAdvances in medical education and practice2019
Five decades of research and theorization on clinical reasoning: a critical review.
Article in Advances in medical education and practice, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- How and When Should Clinical Reasoning Be Taught in Undergraduate Medicine: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses.Perspectives on medical education · 2025Pooled it
- Managing the Complexity-Coherence Trade-Off in Clinical Reasoning: A Two-Stage Graph Ontology Based on WHO International Classifications.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Article
- Intelligent Reasoning Cues: A Framework and Case Study of the Roles of AI Information in Complex Decisions.Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. CHI Conference · 2026Article
- The virtual hospital as a means for undergraduate medical students to practice clinical reasoning: a qualitative interview study.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Community pharmacists' practices and clinical reasoning towards hospital discharge prescription: a study using simulations and retrospective think-aloud methodology.International journal of clinical pharmacy · 2026Article
- Understanding health systems thinking in medical education: qualitative interviews with expert clinicians.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Comparison of clinical preceptorship and small group discussion as educational modalities in modern neurosurgical education: outcomes and perspectives.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Disagreement between human and AI evaluation of treatment plans.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Development and Evaluation of a Clinical Reasoning Case for Second-Year Medical Students.MedEdPORTAL : the journal of teaching and learning resources · 2026Article
- It takes a village: an ethnographic study on how undergraduate medical students use each other to learn clinical reasoning in the workplace.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2025Article
- Treatment-focused clinical reasoning in medical students: relationship with academic success and professional commitment.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- The Cognitive Error Styles of Midwifery Students in Clinical Decision-Making: A Directed Qualitative Content Analysis Study.Journal of advances in medical education & professionalism · 2025Article
- The logic of medical reasoning: toward an integrated inductive, deductive, and abductive approach to clinical practices.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2025Article
- Diagnostic Reasoning in Surgical Pathology.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2025Article
- Influence of risk literacy, decision-making styles and motivation on clinical reasoning in medical students: an ordinal logistic regression analysis.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Expert decision-making in clinicians: An auto-analytic ethnographic study of operational decision-making in urgent care.PloS one · 2025Article
- Medical reasoning in LLMs: an in-depth analysis of DeepSeek R1.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Article
- Teaching therapy decision-making to medical students: a prospective mixed-methods evaluation of a curricular innovation.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Clinical reasoning skills of German and Dutch manual therapists: a cross-sectional study.The Journal of manual & manipulative therapy · 2024Article
- Clinical Reasoning Skills Among Second-Phase Medical Students in West Bengal, India: An Exploratory Study.Cureus · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Clinical reasoning is a complex cognitive process that is essential to evaluate and manage a patient's medical problem. The aim of this paper was to provide a critical review of the research literature on clinical reasoning theories and models. To conduct our study, we applied the process of conducting a literature review in four stages in accordance with the approach of Carnwell and Daly. First, we defined the scope of the review as being limited to clinical reasoning theories and models in medical education. In the second stage, we conducted a search based on related words in PubMed, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, ERIC, ScienceDirect and Web of Science databases. In the third stage, we classified the results of the review into three categories, and in the fourth stage, we concluded and informed further studies. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 31 articles were eligible to be reviewed. Three theories and two models were recognized and classified into three categories. Several theories and models have been proposed in relation to clinical reasoning, but it seems that these theories and models could only explain part of this complex process and not the whole process. Therefore, to fulfill this gap, it may be helpful to build a Meta-model or Meta-theory, which unified all the models, and theories of clinical reasoning.
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