Abstract
The study sought to determine which online journals primary care physicians and specialists not affiliated with an academic medical center access and how the accesses correlate with measures of journal quality and importance. Observational study of full-text accesses made during an eighteen-month digital library trial was performed. Access counts were correlated with six methods composed of nine measures for assessing journal importance: ISI impact factors; number of high-quality articles identified during hand-searches of key clinical journals; production data for ACP Journal Club, InfoPOEMs, and Evidence-Based Medicine; and mean clinician-provided clinical relevance and newsworthiness scores for individual journal titles. Full-text journals were accessed 2,322 times by 87 of 105 physicians. Participants accessed 136 of 348 available journal titles. Physicians often selected journals with relatively higher numbers of articles abstracted in ACP Journal Club. Accesses also showed significant correlations with 6 other measures of quality. Specialists' access patterns correlated with 3 measures, with weaker correlations than for primary care physicians. Primary care physicians, more so than specialists, chose full-text articles from clinical journals deemed important by several measures of value. Most journals accessed by both groups were of high quality as measured by this study's methods for assessing journal importance.
Highlights
A recent systematic review by the Australian National Institute for Clinical Studies reported that in 13 of 24 studies of the information-seeking habits and preferences of health professionals, clinicians indicated journals as the first or second preferred source of information for answering questions that arose in clinical care [1]
This paper addresses the following questions: 1. Which journals did physicians not associated with an academic medical center use when they received access to a basic collection of online resources and services? 2
Independent choices of online journals by the primary care clinicians with few ties to an academic medical center are highly correlated with clinical journal subsets determined by several means
Summary
A recent systematic review by the Australian National Institute for Clinical Studies reported that in 13 of 24 studies of the information-seeking habits and preferences of health professionals, clinicians indicated journals as the first or second preferred source of information for answering questions that arose in clinical care [1]. Rogers reported that surveys at Ohio State University showed that a cultural shift from print to electronic journals for academic researchers and practitioners occurred during 1998 to 2000 [8] This shift came about because of the availability of personal computers, increased built-in links from bibliographic databases to full-text articles, more awareness of the ease of use of full text, and ready availability of a critical mass of important journals and their backfiles. A diffusion study by Chew et al [9] confirmed the results from Rogers et al [8] and Casebeer et al [7], showing that by 2003 a majority of US physicians reported access to the Internet in their offices and clinics and regular seeking of online information
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