Correspondence
Searching the Medical Literature
N Engl J Med 2006; 354:2393June 1, 2006
- Article
To the Editor:
Steinbrook (Jan. 5 issue)1 discusses the extent to which people now use the Internet to look for medical information. However, the article includes incomplete data on the proportion of referrals from PubMed to journals hosted by HighWire. On the basis of Web log statistics at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the actual number of referrals from PubMed was about six times as high as the number reported.
There was even greater access from the PubMed site if viewing of HighWire abstracts is counted. For example, in February 2006, 19 million HighWire abstracts were viewed. After viewing the abstract, 43 percent of users went on to retrieve the full article, but only the subsequent referrals were counted in the HighWire data. When viewing of abstracts is taken into account, PubMed's proportion of access to content in HighWire journals rises to almost 60 percent.
1 ReferencesDonald A.B. Lindberg, M.D.
National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 208941
Steinbrook R . Searching for the right search -- reaching the medical literature. N Engl J Med 2006;354:4-7
Full Text | Web of Science | Medline
Author/Editor Response
After programming changes were made at PubMed in January 2006, we were able to identify additional referrals from PubMed that were previously unattributable to that source. We can now show the portion of referrals from major search engines with more accuracy. Figure 1Figure 1
Referrals from Search Engines to Web Sites of 900 Journals Hosted by HighWire Press. shows the data for February 2006.John Sack
HighWire Press at Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94304
sack@stanford.edu Author/Editor Response
My article included incomplete data on referrals from PubMed to articles in journals hosted by HighWire; these referrals were undercounted. The more accurate data shown in the letter from Sack reflect programming changes that were made after the article was published. As Lindberg notes, a smaller number of searches led to viewing articles than to viewing only abstracts. For some purposes, abstracts provide sufficient information. Abstracts are usually available without charge to the user; many articles are not.
Robert Steinbrook, M.D.
- Citing Articles (1)
Citing Articles
1
Pamela T. Johnson, Jennifer K. Chen, John Eng, Martin A. Makary, Elliot K. Fishman. (2008) A Comparison of World Wide Web Resources for Identifying Medical Information. Academic Radiology 15:9, 1165-1172
CrossRef
