The Internet
The Internet has given both health professionals and the lay public almost instantaneous access to enormous amounts of information. The Internet has tremendous implications for EBHC. The large volume is potentially beneficial but much of it is not organized well. The editor of Scientific American, in a special issue devoted to the Internet, sums up what all librarians have known for a long time.
“…And so, at some point, the Internet has to stop looking like the world’s largest rummage sale. For taming this particular frontier, the right people are librarians, not the cowboys. The Internet is made of information, and nobody knows more about how to order information than librarians, who have been pondering that problem for thousands of years.”9
Much health care information is available with many new publications becoming available online, either duplicating hard copies or in online format alone. The quality of the information is difficult to evaluate and the peer review process that evaluates journal articles is not enforced. The Internet is, however, here to stay, but wisdom and skill are needed to use it effectively, evaluate the quality and usefulness of the information and learn how to deal wisely and appropriately with a proportion of the lay public who are sophisticated users of health care information. More research and understanding is needed on many fronts.
In summary, most scientific communication is still done using journal articles, but because of the quantity and varied formats of published health care information, using health care research requires indexes, online computer systems, and, increasingly, the Internet. The size and complexity of the literature means it is difficult to retrieve citations relevant to the content of the question and appropriate for clinical decision-making. Easy, fast, and efficient retrieval skills can be developed, however, if one understands how the health care literature is structured.5475
Content on this page was last changed on March 19, 2009.
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| 5475. | McKibbon, A. PDQ Evidence-Based Principles and Practice, 1999, BC Decker Inc., Hamilton, Ontario. |