Originally Published MX January/February 2004
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
So Much Literature, So Little Time|
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With hundreds of journals to choose from and little more than four or five hours a week to devote to reviewing the scientific literature, busy clinicians and researchers face a big challenge in keeping up.
Fortunately, it seems that trying to read everything published on a favorite topic is not only a logistical nightmare, but also a counterproductive information overload to be avoided. Exhaustive literature searches often capture articles that present poorly supported, confusing, and potentially biased information. These sources are known as gray literature. Medical professionals need a strategy for identifying core information sources.
One method that works involves a trade-off among considerations of time consumption, cost, and quality of publication assessment.
The reader begins by doing a search through a favorite literature database. The National Library of Medicine's PubMed system, accessible at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez, offers a simple interface to a comprehensive literature storehouse. Using liberal search criteria, the researcher captures a broad range of possibly useful articles. Then he or she reads the titles and abstracts to see which articles are definitely not of interest. This step can rule out 50–60% of the abstracts. It may be time-consuming, but the wider search can provide more insights into the topic than a very restrictive search technique that might miss a relevant article.
The reader next examines the remaining abstracts to see which are available in English, are from readily accessible journals, and describe more rigidly designed trials. This may remove another 10% of the starting total. The searcher then obtains the final candidates.
To maintain time efficiency, the professional reads these using the abstract-introduction-conclusions sequence of overview, perusing the methods and results sections of articles that seem particularly relevant. The reader forms a critical opinion of the topic from these most interesting articles.
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