Doing New Research Dont Forget the Old 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Essay Doing New Research? Don’t Forget the Old Nobody should do a trial without reviewing what is known Mike Clarke O n May 2, 1898, George Gould used his address to the founding meeting of the good quality, but some of it is not. Thus, anyone wishing to use the health literature to make well-informed decisions must both identify the relevant research from amidst this vast amount of information and then appraise it. This is an impossible task for many. Even though making access to the literature easier and cheaper will increase the ability of people to ?nd research, it will also reveal just how much information there is out there and how daunting is the task of making sense of it. with one or more search engines? Almost certainly, as the speed of the search increased through these four Association of Medical Librarians in Philadelphia to present a vision of the future of health information. ‘I look forward,’ he said, ‘to such an organisation of the literary records of medicine that a puzzled worker in any part of the civilised world shall in an hour be able to gain a knowledge pertaining to a subject of the Citation: Clarke M (2004) Doing new research? Don’t forget the old. PLoS Med 1(2): e35. Copyright: ? 2004 Mike Clarke.This is an open- access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. experience of every other man in the world’ [1]. Has his vision been realised? Mike Clarke is director of the United Kingdom Cochrane Centre, Oxford, United Kingdom. E-mail: mclarke@cochrane.co.uk You can get a good idea of the size of the task—and of how electronic publishing and the Internet have transformed the situation—by Information Overload Competing Interests: The author’s employment depends upon the value and importance given to systematic reviews. He is employed by the M