This is a comprehensive guide to finding and using health and medical information on the Internet. Its authors have a wide range of experience between them in healthcare information technology and medical librarianship, and the book reflects their expertise. There are 20 chapters divided into five main sections: (1) “Internet quick tour”; (2) “Searching for information”; (3) “Communication”; (4) “Evaluation”; and (5) “Taking control”.
The “Internet quick tour” is the largest section of the book, with nine chapters covering such topics as online reference material, teaching materials and continuing medical education. The importance of evidence‐based healthcare is recognised too, with a comprehensive chapter on using the Net for support in this area. Access to resources to support biomedical research is well covered in Chapters 6 and 7, where the emphasis is on databases related to research and to funding sources. One does not often see a chapter in guides to the literature on “Finding a job”, but since online applications are becoming increasingly common, and the Net is a great source of job opportunities, its inclusion is to be commended.
The importance of access to current relevant information for patient care, research and education cannot be overemphasised for healthcare professionals and the Internet is making it much easier to find. Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in integrated products feeding relevant information to one’s desktop. Some are free of charge like the BBC News Service (http://news.bbc.co.uk/) as are all the main daily newspapers in the UK. The ability to search several news services using a search tool called NewsTracker (http://nt.excite.com/) which searches more than 300 free online newspapers and magazines is indeed significant, and one can be grateful to the authors for drawing our attention to it. Personalised NewsTracker pages are also available from this site. A similar service is My NewsPage from http://www.individual.com/, which provides one with daily headlines and news briefs via e‐mail to match one’s predefined research profile. An excellent directory listing health and medical Web sites is MedWebPlus (http://www.medlibplus.com/subject) which is freely available on the Net.
Section 2 “Finding information on the Internet” consists of eight chapters which cover the main search and metasearch engines, Web directories, health and medical search engines, and information gateways like OMNI (http://www.omni.ac.uk/), Healthfinder (www.healthfinder.gov), Medical Matrix (http://www.medmatrix.org/), CliniWeb (http://www.ohsu.edu/cliniweb), and MEDLINEplus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus) are highlighted. It is amazing how the search engines vary in their coverage. The best, in my view, is Google (http://www.google.com), which now indexes in excess of 580 million pages fully and over 500 million pages partially. The general information gateways are supplemented with specialised resources relevant to specific subject areas like Hardin MD (http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md) and Orthogate (http://www.orthogate.org).
A recent addition to the online medical bibliographic resources mentioned in this book is the development of the UK’s National Electronic Library for Health (http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/) which is proving to be extremely popular with healthcare workers throughout the NHS. Commercial organisations too, offer subscriptions to Web‐based database services with novel interfaces to established or new databases, for example the Web of Science from the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia and ProQuest’s Digital Dissertations service.
Details of searching the main medical and healthcare databases are provided in the chapter on searching the medical literature. The main features of PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed), that popular version of MEDLINE available free of charge on the Web, are described in detail, and all the other major databases are also covered.
Developments in access to electronic journals and to full‐text journals from established publishers have been a feature of the twenty‐first century. What most people do not appear to realise is that prior subscriptions are normally required to obtain access to individual titles on the Internet. Difficulties with electronic copyright continue to pressurise hardworking publishers and librarians alike, and it looks as though it will be a long time before a solution is reached. One interesting solution may be the development of new pre‐print archives. PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/) went live in January 2000 and has met with considerable success. Another new service is BioMed Central which publishes peer‐reviewed primary articles from all areas of biology and medicine. It will also provide a customised e‐mail update and enhanced searching of PubMed and PubMed Central.
Section 3 of this book is devoted to using the Internet for communication purposes and covers such topics as online chat rooms, mailing lists and newspapers, together with details of how to get connected. The quality of information available on the Internet is always cause for concern and so it is indeed gratifying that the authors have included a section (Section 4) on quality issues, providing details of a number of studies which have examined the great variation in the quality of the information available.
The concluding chapters, Section 5, are devoted to showing how one can take control of the Internet by using the browser to organise favourite pages, and create simple Web pages for oneself. An alphabetical list of links to major sites of healthcare and medical information on the Internet is to be found at the end of the book, and the authors would welcome e‐mail contact with readers for comments and suggestions.
While this is an excellent book in general, I was a little disappointed in the part on continuing medical education (CME) and on the Royal Colleges. One would take the impression from this that there are no other CME courses available except in medicine. The brief sections on the Royal Colleges exclude entirely the UK and Irish Surgical Colleges, so making the information incomplete. Not only is the Royal College of Surgeons in London not mentioned, but neither are the Edinburgh or Glasgow Colleges. The Web site of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (http://www.rcsi.ie) is omitted too, and this is a pity, since there is a demonstration of its new online course BeST (Basic Electronic Surgical Training) which covers the core content for the Associate Fellowship Examinations of the UK and Irish Surgical Colleges.
Members of the healthcare professions, librarians, undergraduate and postgraduate students will all find this book a useful reference work and guide to finding and using health and medical information on the Internet.
