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medpundit |
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Saturday, October 19, 2002The availability of full-text articles on the internet has greatly improved ease of access to medical information. This development must be seen as a great benefit, but it may have generated a new type of bias. Everyday information-seeking activities, especially by junior staff and students, often concentrate on research published in journals that are available as full text on the internet, and ignore relevant studies that are not available in full text, thus introducing an element of bias into their search result. This bias I propose to call FUTON (Full Text On the Net) bias. It will not affect researchers who are used to comprehensive searches of published medical studies, but it does affect staff and students with limited experience in doing searches. This bias may have the same effect in daily clinical practice as publication bias or language bias when doing systematic reviews of published studies. Can’t you just see the medical students and junior staff sitting at home on their futons, relaxing to their favorite music or watching television while doing their medical research? Much better than sitting in a stuffy medical library pouring over Index Medicus. He goes on to make a sensible plea to publishers of medical journals everywhere: Publishers of medical journals should feel encouraged to make the content of their journals available as full text to avoid losing out to their competitors. This trend will gain further strength if the journals that make preprints available on the internet or publish internet-only versions of reports are taken into account. I second that motion. There are a lot of physicians who don’t have access to well-stocked medical libraries. They practice in remote regions that just don’t have the means or the population to support them. They rely on the internet. Unfortunately, the prices for an online subscription to most of the journals is just as high as their print version, making it impossible to subscribe to them all. They would be doing a good deed by making their papers available on the web. (The New England Journal does this to some extent now. They make important papers available to everyone without registration. They also make articles that are older than six months available with free registration. JAMA makes important papers available for everyone, but they don’t have any free access for old papers.) posted by Sydney on 10/19/2002 08:36:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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