Handout from Information Searching in Health Care, p. 37. Source Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. The larger objective is to influence increased bibliographic access to the core literature. This paper introduces the Project for Mapping the Literature of Allied Health and the common bibliometric methodology used for the five specific studies reported in the accompanying papers. Findings relating to format used, age of citations, dispersion of literature, and indexing coverage for the different fields are compared.
Journals are the most heavily cited format.
Fields differ by the currency of cited material, with physical therapy and speech language pathology displaying use of the oldest citations. The set of core journals is small for each field, particularly in speech-language pathology. Information such as that reported by the project can help librarians in improving information transfer for the allied health professionals they serve. In her opinion, Identifying the core journal literature and ensuring strong bibliographic access can significantly contribute to the dissemination and utilization of research results, encourage communication among researchers, and ultimately contribute to the building of the knowledge base of a field. Librarians who service allied health personnel are well aware that access to allied health literature is no where near as complete as it is for medical doctors, and Schloman argues that overall, the literature of health sciences librarianship has paid little attention to the information needs of allied health professionals.