Information prescriptions, 1930-2013: an international history and comprehensive review.

OBJECTIVES: Recently, government agencies in several countries have promoted information prescription programs to increase patients' understanding of their conditions. The practice has a long history and many publications, but no comprehensive literature reviews such as this. METHODS: Using a variety of high-precision and high-recall strategies, the researcher searched two dozen online bibliographic databases, citation databases, and repositories, as well as many print sources, to identify and retrieve documents for review. Of these documents, ninety relevant English-language case reports, research reports, and reviews published from 1930-2013 met the study criteria. RESULTS: Early to mid-twentieth century reports covered long-standing practices and used no rigorous research methods. The literature since the mid-1990s reports on short-term trial projects, especially of government-sponsored programs in the United States and United Kingdom. Although the concept of information prescription has been in the literature and practiced for decades, no long-term research studies were found. CONCLUSIONS: Most of the literature is anecdotal concerning small pilot projects. The reports investigate physician, patient, and librarian satisfaction but not changes in patient knowledge or behavior. Many twenty-first century projects emphasize materials and projects from specific government agencies and commercial enterprises. IMPLICATIONS: While the practice is commonly believed to be a good idea and there are many publications on the subject, few studies provide any evidence of the efficacy of information prescriptions for increased patient knowledge. Well-designed and executed large or long-term studies might produce needed evidence for professional practice.

An informatics approach to chronicling the history of IMIA.

With the 50th Anniversary of IMIA approaching in 2017, the IMIA Board approved the creation of a Taskforce for compiling materials and writing a history of the organization. As part of the work of the Taskforce, the authors have developed informatics tools, and begun collecting IMIA-related historical materials from its members, while soliciting participation and contributions from those involved in the early days of the organization and its predecessor IFIP-TC4. This poster describes the structure and preliminary contents of the media mining and presentation tools designed at Rutgers University for use by the IMIA History Editorial Board, being constituted to produce the 50th Anniversary publication, as well as an online archive of materials chronicling the evolution of IMIA. A major feature of the data repository is its ability to present different modalities of textual, visual and graphical (timelines, trends) summarizations for the IMIA document collection. It will be augmented with audio material, and will serve as an archival repository for historical research, including software tools for text analysis and extraction of the information entering into the 50th Anniversary volume.

Reflexões críticas sobre os três erres, ou os periódicos brasileiros excluídos / Critical reflections on the three Rs, or Brazilian journals excluded

O autor faz um debate em cima da idéia de que o QUALIS 2010 é passível de aperfeiçoamento, através do conceito dos três erres (Remover periódicos de revisão, Reconhecer outras métricas de avaliação, Reavaliar periódicos brasileiros) (Rocha e Silva, 2010) para com outros indicadores científicos, como o Journal Citation Report

Reflexões críticas sobre os três erres, ou os periódicos brasileiros excluídos

O autor faz um debate em cima da idéia de que o QUALIS 2010 é passível de aperfeiçoamento, através do conceito dos três erres (Remover periódicos de revisão, Reconhecer outras métricas de avaliação, Reavaliar periódicos brasileiros) (Rocha e Silva, 2010) para com outros indicadores científicos, como o Journal Citation Report (JCR)

The Danish draft board's intelligence test, Børge Priens Prøve: psychometric properties and research applications through 50 years.

For over 50 years the Danish draft board has used the same test, Børge Priens Prøve (BPP) for cognitive abilities, involving four paper-and-pencil subtests, to assess suitability for conscription. The potential availability of test scores has been an invaluable resource for research into factors relating to intelligence. In this article the circumstances of the original development of the test are briefly presented, followed by a description of the four subtests and the conditions of testing, scoring and result registration. Over forty studies are identified, including some unpublished, which have explored the psychometric properties of the BPP and have shown the relationships between intelligence as measured by the BPP and a wide range of biological, social and health-related factors.

The great contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, and IndexCat.

OBJECTIVE: The systematic indexing of medical literature by the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine) has been called "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge." In the 1870s, the library launched two indexes: the Index Medicus and the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. Index Medicus is better remembered today as the forerunner of MEDLINE, but Index Medicus began as the junior partner of what the library saw as its major publication, the Index-Catalogue. However, the Index-Catalogue had been largely overlooked by many medical librarians until 2004, when the National Library of Medicine released IndexCat, the online version of Index-Catalogue. Access to this huge amount of material raised new questions: What was the coverage of the Index-Catalogue? How did it compare and overlap with the Index Medicus? METHOD: Over 1,000 randomly generated Index Medicus citations were cross-referenced in IndexCat. RESULTS: Inclusion, form, content, authority control, and subject headings were evaluated, revealing that the relationship between the two publications was neither simple nor static through time. In addition, the authors found interesting anomalies that shed light on how medical literature was selected and indexed in "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge."

Nomenclature for congenital and paediatric cardiac disease: historical perspectives and The International Pediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code.

Clinicians working in the field of congenital and paediatric cardiology have long felt the need for a common diagnostic and therapeutic nomenclature and coding system with which to classify patients of all ages with congenital and acquired cardiac disease. A cohesive and comprehensive system of nomenclature, suitable for setting a global standard for multicentric analysis of outcomes and stratification of risk, has only recently emerged, namely, The International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code. This review, will give an historical perspective on the development of systems of nomenclature in general, and specifically with respect to the diagnosis and treatment of patients with paediatric and congenital cardiac disease. Finally, current and future efforts to merge such systems into the paperless environment of the electronic health or patient record on a global scale are briefly explored. On October 6, 2000, The International Nomenclature Committee for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease was established. In January, 2005, the International Nomenclature Committee was constituted in Canada as The International Society for Nomenclature of Paediatric and Congenital Heart Disease. This International Society now has three working groups. The Nomenclature Working Group developed The International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code and will continue to maintain, expand, update, and preserve this International Code. It will also provide ready access to the International Code for the global paediatric and congenital cardiology and cardiac surgery communities, related disciplines, the healthcare industry, and governmental agencies, both electronically and in published form. The Definitions Working Group will write definitions for the terms in the International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code, building on the previously published definitions from the Nomenclature Working Group. The Archiving Working Group, also known as The Congenital Heart Archiving Research Team, will link images and videos to the International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code. The images and videos will be acquired from cardiac morphologic specimens and imaging modalities such as echocardiography, angiography, computerized axial tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, as well as intraoperative images and videos. Efforts are ongoing to expand the usage of The International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code to other areas of global healthcare. Collaborative efforts are underway involving the leadership of The International Nomenclature Committee for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease and the representatives of the steering group responsible for the creation of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, administered by the World Health Organisation. Similar collaborative efforts are underway involving the leadership of The International Nomenclature Committee for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation, who are the owners of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine or "SNOMED". The International Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Code was created by specialists in the field to name and classify paediatric and congenital cardiac disease and its treatment. It is a comprehensive code that can be freely downloaded from the internet (http://www.IPCCC.net) and is already in use worldwide, particularly for international comparisons of outcomes. The goal of this effort is to create strategies for stratification of risk and to improve healthcare for the individual patient. The collaboration with the World Heath Organization, the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation, and the healthcare industry, will lead to further enhancement of the International Code, and to its more universal use.

Laws, leaders, and legends of the modern National Library of Medicine.

PURPOSE: The paper is an expanded version of the 2007 Joseph Leiter National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Medical Library Association Lecture presented at MLA '07, the Medical Library Association annual meeting in Philadelphia in May 2007. It presents an historical accounting of four major pieces of legislation, beginning with the NLM Act of 1956 up through the creation of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The transition from the United States Armed Forces Medical Library to the United States National Library of Medicine in 1956 was a major turning point in NLM's history, scope, and direction. The succeeding landmark legislative achievements--namely, the 1965 Medical Library Assistance Act, the 1968 Joint Resolution forming the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, and the 1988 authorization for the National Center for Biotechnology Information--transformed the library into a major biomedical communications institution and a leader and supporter of an effective national network of libraries of medicine. The leaders of the library and its major advocates--including Dr. Michael DeBakey, Senator Lister Hill, and Senator Claude Pepper-together contributed to the creation of the modern NLM.

CROWNWeb--the evolution of kidney data management (Part I).

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is developing a Web-based application, Consolidated Renal Operations in a Web-Enabled Network (CROWNWeb), which is designed to facilitate data entry, updating, and retrieval for dialysis facilities nationwide. Part 1 of this three-part series outlines the history of end-stage renal disease and Medicare, and covers the rapid growth of ESRD data management as well as other events that require progression to an online data collection and management system.