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EDITOR
In
their editorial Smith and Chalmers call for a new and most welcome initiative
that would provide access to a synthesis of valid, relevant clinical
information.1 Those of us responsible
for the original Medline database wish success to any endeavour that
hopes to transform health care (and that might bring honour to the
Queen). Your readers might be interested to learn about some recent
improvements of our own in this direction.
The US National Library of Medicine began to link sources on the internet from the inception of free PubMed access to Medline in 1997. (It was vice president Al Gore, not the then first lady Hillary Clinton, who announced free access to Medline via PubMed at a ceremony in the US Congress.) The LinkOut feature of PubMed is designed to provide users with a wide variety of relevant web accessible resources, including full text articles, biological databases, consumer health information, research tools, and more. PubMed also links users to an extensive database, ClinicalTrials.gov, which provides patients, family members, and the general public with current information about clinical research studies. In 2002 PubMed citations will include links from the American College of Physicians Journal Club and other evidence based medicine journals to the original journal article being commented on.
Late in 2001 we complemented our "clinical queries" feature, which filters
references using a method based largely on the work of Haynes et al,
with a new filter called systematic reviews.2
This feature has much the result in mind as the proposal by Smith
and Chalmersthe
ability to retrieve systematic reviews and meta-analysis studies for
a specific search topic. Since the systematic reviews filter is so
new and as yet unpublicised, they were not mentioned in the
editorial. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which
has been indexed in Medline since 2000, is among the evidence based
resources. Moreover, Clinical Evidence has been approved for
indexation in Medline, and its citations, with full text links, will
begin to appear in PubMed early in 2002.
Sheldon Kotzin
Bibliographic Services Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethsda, MD
20850, USA Kotzin@nlm.nih.gov
| 1. | Smith R, Chalmers I. Britain's gift: a "Medline" of
synthesised evidence. BMJ 2001; 323: 1437-1438 |
| 2. | Haynes RB, Wilczynski N, McKibbon KA, Walker CJ, Sinclair
K. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound
studies in Medline. J Am Med Inform Assoc 1994; 1: 447-458 |
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