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- The medical literature has grown to an unmanageable size, and we need to
- develop information systems that provide better accessibility. An internal
- medicine residency program is an ideal setting for developing a system in
- which articles are screened for usefulness in clinical decision making and
- organized to be rapidly accessible and relatively inexpensive to use. In
- our residency training program, we use clinical problem-solving, journal
- club article review, and teaching conference preparation to generate
- appropriate articles from PAPERCHASE (MEDLINE) database searches. With the
- chief resident supervising the process, articles are then selected and
- organized in a computerized article file. The software program, Reference
- Manager (Research Information Systems, Inc., Encinitas, California), stores
- article citations and supports searches using standard, medical subject
- heading vocabulary key words. In an 18-month period, residents have
- collected more than 1800 references appropriate to clinical decision making
- and have established an article file that is now used daily as a medical
- information source.
-