Primacy publications are source documents such as journal articles and press releases. Secondary publications are summaries and syntheses of primary publications. Examples of secondary publications include practice guidelines, review articles, and meta-analyses. Tertiary publications are printed textbooks and online hypertexts.
Published in Chapter:
Medical Search Engines
Bob Badgett (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA), Suresh Chalasani (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA), Rajendra V. Boppana (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA), and Jacqueline A. Pugh (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-889-5.ch109
Abstract
Twenty years ago, researchers identified the difficulties physicians have in answering the clinical questions that arise during medical care (Covell, Uman, & Manning, 1985). Fifteen years ago, the “Evidence-based medicine” movement arose (Cohen, 2001) and exhorted clinicians to use computers to look up the answers to questions as they arise during clinical care. Fortuitously for the proponents of evidence-based medicine the Internet matured in the 1990s{Hersh 1996 #3370}, epitomized by the launching of PubMed by Al Gore in June, 1997. PubMed, developed by the National Institutes of Health, provided the first free access to millions of biomedical research articles at MEDLINE. Unfortunately, the Internet has not fulfilled its potential to assist physicians in answering clinical questions. A recent study found that physicians obtain answers to only 40% of questions that arise during patient care (Ely, Osheroff, Chambliss, Ebell, & Rosenbaum, 2004); this rate is not much different than the rate of 30% reported 20 years ago (Covell et al., 1985).