Guest guest Posted June 4, 2003 Report Share Posted June 4, 2003 Dear CHA, I'm following up on the discussion on San Qi but more the general situation with looking for journal articles. NLM/Pubmed only indexes selected peer-reviewed OM journals. Here at the New England School of Acupuncture's Kelly Library, less than 40% of our journal holdings are indexed by NLM. Our collection focuses specifically on AOM publications with a smattering of CAM (some 45 active subscriptions) ; as many of you know very few OM journals are " peer-reviewed " . The Kelly Library does its own article-level indexing and has a stand-alone citation database with over 14,200 citation records. We have few abstracts -- only about 500. None of our records have subject terms because there is no subject authority list for AOM. When I do a search in Pubmed on " acupuncture OR medicine, Chinese traditional " I get 12526 citation records. Many of these records appear in biomedical journals, not OM journals. I calculated that there's probably 16,000+ unique citations for OM journal articles between Pubmed and the Kelly Library's articles database. (I'd also note that ELM adds far fewer subject terms to AAOM citation records than their biomedical counterparts so the quality of the records is less.) EBSCO has a good fulltext database called Althea Watch (for $2500/yr) which indexes 9 AAOM journals -- only 8 of which are actively being published. The important thing for me (as an information specialist and a practicing acupuncturist/herbalist) is understanding that whether we use PubMed, Althea Watch, or our own bibliographic databases, these citation databases determine what we know about the published literature. If a database doesn't index a journal I won't get a link to it. And if the record has few access points I have even less chance of finding it. The information may be there but I won't know it. Other complicating factors include nomenclature: to start I'll mention romanization issues. Wade Giles, Pinyin and vagaries within these systems all complicate searching for literature: then there's pharmaceutical vs. botanical names, whether or not 2 word names are presented as one or two words (San Chi, San Qi, Sanchi, Sanqi, Radix Notoginseng, Panax Notoginseng...) Essentially you get what you ask for; if you look for San Qi you get records with " San Qi " ; not Yunnan Bai Yao or San Chi, Radix Notoginseng, or Panax Notoginseng. (NB: There is no entry for San Qi in MeSH.) MeSH is the thesaurus for Medline/PubMed (see PubMed's MeSH database http: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=mesh). A thesaurus is a list of subject terms that are used to describe an article and appear in the Subject field of a citation. It is MeSH which mitigates our search query and allows more access points via the search engines. Without a thesaurus or subject field we can only look for words that appear in the Title or Abstract of a citation if we're looking for a topic like " San Qi " or " Yunnan Bai Yao " . So make sure the articles you publish have very rich, descriptive words in the titles!! NLM is adding MeSH terms for individual herbs; but we need to remember that for NLM, the 8 principles & Chinese herbal theory are archaic oddities of anthropologic interest, not as a way to structure their understandings of these substances or their functions/effects. I would draw your attention to the location of Acupuncture Therapy in MeSH: it has no relationship to traditional Chinese medicine (or Medicine, Chinese Traditional as they call it in MeSH). It is just another CAM modality like " anthroposophy " and " reflexotherapy " -- other CAM modalities noted in MeSH. What we call things is very important, particularly if these names are indexed by a computer and determine if we can retrieve information or not. To date we as a profession have not developed a subject thesaurus (like MeSH or CINAHL from the nursing profession) for ourselves. This is a major impediment to accessing the published literature and has economic and clinical ramifications. When we think about the development of our profession I would include the need to develop a subject thesaurus. Development of thesauri is done in other professions by the professional associations either alone or in alliances: think Modern Language Association's MLA database/thesaurus, American Mathematical Society's MathSci database/thesaurus, National Association of Social Workers' Social Work Abstracts... I wonder when our profession will want to develop its own thesaurus? Della Lawhon, Kelly Library New England School of Acupuncture 40 Belmont Street Watertown, MA 02472 617-926-1788, x: 116 www.nesa.edu/library.html Chinese Herbs " Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds " -- Albert Einstein Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted June 4, 2003 Report Share Posted June 4, 2003 , wrote: > I wonder when our profession will want to develop its own thesaurus? >>> : Would COMP be interested in doing that if practitioners contributed money? Jim Ramholz P.S. Cleaning up last night I found photos of the very first COMP meeting Bob Flaws was kind enough to sponsor! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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