Medical books

With the emergence of the internet, the way that information in the medical community is handled has changed vastly. A large quantity of medical books are contained on the internet and medical libraries are beginning to link to these online medical books from their websites. There is also a growing concern with the unbalanced way that medical books are used within the medical community, as more useful information from a quality medical book is ignored. Another shift shows attention to medical journals, with medical books being increasingly ignored. This poses the question, are medical books and their relevancy losing ground in a rapidly changing medical world?

The Advantage and Disadvantage of Medical Journals:
Medical journals have an advantage over medical books because they are released more frequently and are preferred by most physicians as a way of keeping up with the latest developments in the medical field. The contents and history of medical journals have also been indexed for the past 100 years, creating a rich archive of valuable information for historical purposes. While the medical journal has a role in the medical community that makes sense, others feel that the medical book is one of the most underrated vehicles for medical researchers.

The shift from print to online material has extended medical books and their role within medical research. But the point of medical books continue to be overlooked. The purpose of a medical book is not to contain information that would be topical, paralleling news in last weeks paper, but rather to accumulate information from several primary resources and presents a subject in its entirety within a context. It could compare present and past views on medical subjects and the medical book is, in a way, a means of saving time. Searching through medical journal archives for original information can take a massive amount of time to complete. Medical books attempt to give medical professionals a valuable shortcut for information retrieval. This is especially important in a world where clinicians value the finding of useful and relevant information as quick as possible.

Structure of Clinical Information:
Medical librarians are placed with the tough task of maintaining a resource library of medical books within a topical timeline and range of subjects and information. They are also responsible in categorizing it in a way that researchers can easily retrieve information that they need. There are four frames as an organizational method for librarians to classify their resources: prediagnostic assessment, diagnosis, treatment choice, and learning. A researcher searching for diagnosis information can easily find what they are looking for in this system.

Family doctors also can benefit from another medical book classification system for the swift discovery of relevant information: drug choice, dosage, adverse reactions, symptom and physical finding etiologies, nontherapeutic management options, ethics, prevention, and epidemiological information.

Online Material Access:
Unfortunately, even in the advanced stages of the internet age, very few efforts are being used to provide access to structural components of online medical books in collections that are available to the public. Also, online information from online medical books is not extensive enough to be used within a clinical atmosphere.