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The Informationist
- Frank Davidoff, MD; and
- Valerie Florance, PhD
The Editors welcome submissions for possible publication in the Letters section. Authors of letters should:
•Include no more than 300 words of text, three authors, and five references
•Type with double-spacing
•Send three copies of the letter, an authors' form signed by all authors, and a cover letter describing any conflicts of interest related to the contents of the letter.
Letters commenting on an Annals article will be considered if they are received within 6 weeks of the time the article was published. Only some of the letters received can be published. Published letters are edited and may be shortened; tables and figures are included only selectively. Authors will be notified that the letter has been received. If the letter is selected for publication, the author will be notified about 3 weeks before the publication date. Unpublished letters cannot be returned.
Annals welcomes electronically submitted letters.
IN RESPONSE:
Ms. Root Jorgensen cites evidence, as did the authors of several other letters, that drug information specialists can contribute to improvements in patient outcomes, reduce prescribing errors, save money, and even decrease mortality. Clinicians look for information on drug prescribing more often than information of any other type (1-3), so the observation that drug information specialists have a substantial impact on clinical care is predictable. Predictability aside, we take the success of drug information specialist programs as important, albeit indirect, support for the potential value of informationists throughout clinical medicine, since the training and clinical role of drug information specialists are similar to those we propose for informationists. Drug information specialists can clearly serve as a model for information subspecialists within a more general informationist framework; whether they can effectively assume a broader informationist role remains to be seen.
Dr. Sandroni's demonstration of successful searches in a mean time of 8 minutes is encouraging. Others (4) have found, however, that even expert searchers need an average of nearly 30 minutes per search. Moreover, judging from the observation that clinicians themselves at best perform less than one electronic literature search per week (2), relying almost exclusively on nonelectronic information sources that require only 0.5 to 1.5 minutes per question to give them an answer (3), even 8 minutes per search may be unacceptably long for busy practitioners.
We agree with Houghton and Rich that hand-held digital assistants, particularly wireless models, may speed up real-time information retrieval in clinical settings. The true potential of these devices has yet to be explored, however, and we suspect that in the long run they will be more useful to informationists than to clinicians themselves.
Finally, while Mr. Schott's elegy on the impending death of hospital libraries is understandable, his pessimism, in our view, is justified only if medical libraries are defined narrowly as archives. Archiving is a crucial function of libraries, but while it is still necessary it is no longer sufficient for the survival of libraries. Medical information is not simply a resource to be stored and treasured but a living, dynamic force. Libraries and librarians therefore need to redefine themselves and their roles accordingly; if they do, they will flourish. In that connection, we have been pleased to learn that our proposal for informationists is already being actively considered in the medical library community as a credible way of dealing with these new realities (5).
Valerie Florance, PhD
Association of American Medical Colleges; Washington, DC 20037
The Editors welcome submissions for possible publication in the Letters section. Authors of letters should:
•Include no more than 300 words of text, three authors, and five references
•Type with double-spacing
•Send three copies of the letter, an authors' form signed by all authors, and a cover letter describing any conflicts of interest related to the contents of the letter.
Letters commenting on an Annals article will be considered if they are received within 6 weeks of the time the article was published. Only some of the letters received can be published. Published letters are edited and may be shortened; tables and figures are included only selectively. Authors will be notified that the letter has been received. If the letter is selected for publication, the author will be notified about 3 weeks before the publication date. Unpublished letters cannot be returned.
Annals welcomes electronically submitted letters.
- Copyright ©2004 by the American College of Physicians
