Haug J D
Academic Library Services, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina 27858, USA.
Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1997 Jul;85(3):223-32.
Identification of the resources physicians use to acquire information for clinical practice and medical research is an important area of research for health sciences librarianship and medical practice. During the past twenty years several studies have addressed questions about physicians' preferences for information sources, but generalization from the results of these studies has been hampered by limited sampling, diverse methods, and varied reportorial formats. Meta-analysis provides a method for reducing these limits. Using a meta-analytic procedure, this study reviews twelve studies published between 1978 and 1992, categorizes and ranks the physicians' preferred information sources reported in each study, then aggregates and counts the frequencies of the top six preferences, as well as the associated first and second preferences, for all the study populations or their strata. The results indicate that physicians prefer to obtain information from journals and books, but also that they often consult colleagues to get answers to clinical and research questions. The implications of these findings for health sciences librarianship are briefly discussed.
确定医生用于获取临床实践和医学研究信息的资源，是健康科学图书馆学和医学实践研究的一个重要领域。在过去二十年里，有几项研究探讨了医生对信息来源的偏好问题，但这些研究结果的普遍适用性受到了抽样有限、方法多样和报告格式各异的阻碍。元分析提供了一种减少这些限制的方法。本研究采用元分析程序，回顾了1978年至1992年间发表的十二项研究，对每项研究中报告的医生偏好的信息来源进行分类和排名，然后汇总并统计所有研究人群或其分层中前六项偏好以及相关的第一和第二偏好的频率。结果表明，医生更喜欢从期刊和书籍中获取信息，但他们也经常向同事咨询以获得临床和研究问题的答案。本文简要讨论了这些发现对健康科学图书馆学的启示。
