bims-librar 2018-05-13 papers

Issue of 2018‒05‒13
seven papers selected by
Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society

Am J Med. 2018 May 03. pii: S0002-9343(18)30396-6. [Epub ahead of print]

Online Health Searches and their Perceived Effects on Patients and Patient-Clinician Relationships: A Systematic Review,,✯✯✯.

Jane Wang, Tamara Ashvetiya, Emmanuel Quaye, Kapil Parakh, Seth S Martin.

Online health searches are common and may be impacting patients and their relationships with their clinicians in ways that are not fully understood. We searched PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Reviews, Cochrane Trials, Scopus, and CINAHL from 1 January 1990 to 29 January 2016 for studies in which patients searched online for any aspect of healthcare and then visited their clinician. We extracted data pertaining to either patients' or clinicians' perceptions of the effects of these online searches on patients and the patient-clinician relationship. Searches seemed to induce patient anxiety but more often led to patient reassurance, clinical understanding, and empowerment. Patients tended to perceive that online health searches had a positive effect on the patient-clinician relationship, though the nature of the effect could depend on the clinician's response to patient queries regarding the information. Clinicians generally perceived neutral effects on patients and the patient-clinician relationship, and commonly raised concerns about accuracy of online content. Significant methodological heterogeneity prevented quantitative synthesis. Accuracy of online health search content was not assessed, and randomized controlled trials were notably lacking.

Keywords: Health search; Internet accuracy; Internet health search; Online health search; Patient-clinician relationship

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2018.04.019

Artif Intell Med. 2018 May 02. pii: S0933-3657(17)30415-3. [Epub ahead of print]

Leveraging Wikipedia knowledge to classify multilingual biomedical documents.

Marcos Antonio Mouriño García, Roberto Pérez Rodríguez, Luis Anido Rifón.

This article presents a classifier that leverages Wikipedia knowledge to represent documents as vectors of concepts weights, and analyses its suitability for classifying biomedical documents written in any language when it is trained only with English documents. We propose the cross-language concept matching technique, which relies on Wikipedia interlanguage links to convert concept vectors between languages. The performance of the classifier is compared to a classifier based on machine translation, and two classifiers based on MetaMap. To perform the experiments, we created two multilingual corpus. The first one, Multi-Lingual UVigoMED (ML-UVigoMED) is composed of 23,647 Wikipedia documents about biomedical topics written in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Galician, Romanian, and Icelandic. The second one, English-French-Spanish-German UVigoMED (EFSG-UVigoMED) is composed of 19,210 biomedical abstract extracted from MEDLINE written in English, French, Spanish, and German. The performance of the approach proposed is superior to any of the state-of-the art classifier in the benchmark. We conclude that leveraging Wikipedia knowledge is of great advantage in tasks of multilingual classification of biomedical documents.

Keywords: Biomedical document classification; Hybrid word-concept document representation; Multilingual text classification; Wikipedia Miner semantic annotator; Wikipedia-based bag of concepts document representation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artmed.2018.04.007

Med Teach. 2018 May 07. 1-7

Why research productivity of medical faculty declines after attaining professor rank? A multi-center study from Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Pakistan.

Salman Yousuf Guraya, Khalid Ibrahim Khoshhal, Muhamad Saiful Bahri Yusoff, Maroof Aziz Khan.

OBJECTIVES: Research has shown a fall of research productivity of faculty after their promotion to professor rank. This study explores the factors that lead to this decline in research productivity of professors in medical discipline.METHODS: A 20-item questionnaire was distributed online to medical professors of a Saudi, Malaysian and a Pakistani medical school. The participants were instructed to select their responses on a 5-point Likert's scale and the collected data was analyzed for quantitative and qualitative results.
RESULTS: Of 161, 110 responded; response rate of 68.3%. About 35% professors spent 1-4 hours and 2% spent 19-25 hours per week for research. As many as 7% did not publish a single article and 29% had published 10 or more articles after attaining professor rank. During the last two years, 44% professors had published 5 or more research articles. Majority pointed out a lack of research support and funds, administrative burden and difficulty in data collection as the main obstacles to their research.
CONCLUSIONS: This research has identified time constraints and insufficient support for research as key barriers to medical professors' research productivity. Financial and technical support and lesser administrative work load are some suggested remedies to foster the professors' research output.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2018.1465532

Arthroscopy. 2018 May;pii: S0749-8063(18)30233-0. [Epub ahead of print]34(5): 1379

Quality Submissions and Editorial Commentaries Require Heavy Lifting: Journal Growth Risks Information Overload.

James H Lubowitz, Jefferson C Brand, Michael J Rossi.

Our journal has grown in pages including more articles plus commentary. On the one hand, we see this as a subscriber benefit, but we also recognize that more is not always better. We risk information overload resulting in fatigue and the inability to read every word of every article. The challenge of information overload has expanded since the explosion of the internet and electronic communications. We could increase our already high rejection rates, but at the risk of rejecting high-quality research, which we do not prefer. In the end, guided by our Journal Board of Trustees and the Arthroscopy Association of North America Board of Directors, our Editors and Associate Editors will continue to grapple with the positive challenge of robust growth.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arthro.2018.03.013

BMJ Evid Based Med. 2018 May 05. pii: bmjebm-2018-110967. [Epub ahead of print]

Scientific index: a complementary scale for the h-index.

Zahid Hussain Khan, Masoud Nashibi, Seyed Amir Javadi.

Keywords: epidemiology; medical journalism

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2018-110967

Early Hum Dev. 2018 May 02. pii: S0378-3782(18)30296-2. [Epub ahead of print]

WASP (Write a Scientific Paper): Data protection, a guide for health researchers.

Victor Grech, Hugo Agius-Muscat.

Data protection (DP) protects crucial and humane fundamentals - the respect of human rights, particularly protecting aspects of privacy and confidentiality for living and identifiable persons. DP is enshrined in legislation, and this paper will outline the duties of potential data controllers (researchers) when applying for access to data, when processing said data, and what to do with it at the end of the study.

Keywords: Biostatistics; Computer security; Computers; Data protection; Research; Software

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2018.04.021