MD It is not news that medicine and other health care areas are changing. In recent years, physicians have been confronted with the challenge of the exponential increase in medical knowledge, as approximately two million articles are published annually in close to 23,000 biomedical journals. It is estimated that a general physician has to read 19 articles a day for 365 days each year to keep abreast with his field. The challenge is compounded further by the fact that much of the published knowledge is of controversial value. 2 In a recently published article in the Annals of Saudi Medicine , Stewart elegantly introduced the readers to the new approach.
Computerized databases are the main search resources.
MedlinE, perhaps the most frequently used medical database, contains approximately seven million citations and abstracts from only 4000 journals. This multipurpose database is produced by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed allows searchers to find articles by specifying publication type and also determining the sensitivity and specificity of the search. PubMed also has an advanced search option operated by a powerful search engine developed by McMaster University to permit filtering the literature to optimize retrieval of clinically applicable studies. The two publications contain peer-reviewed abstracts from prestigious biomedical journals, selected based on quality and the level of evidence they provide.