Information access to Turkish medical literature

Abstract

Increasing amount of information has brought about agenda problems on the storage and access of information. The studying on the information access, has begun at the health science area because of the rapid and updated information needs and the majority of the publications in this area. At the end of the eighteenth century, growth of the scientific literature proved that the librariers are insufficient to access information itself. As a result, the earlier studies of medical literature in 1987s has begun at the Library of the Surgeon Genaral's Office which is called now as National Library of Medicine in the United States. However, the bibliographic sources were in puslished form at the begining of indexing studies, the computerized bibliographic databases has been developed in the mid 1960's. Unfortunately, it is too late to keep up with those studies for our country. Although the lack of a national medical index, the medical literature is still increasing rapidly and without any bibliographic control in Turkey. Medical scientists have to spend great effort to access the Turkish medical literature. So that reason, we established our studies on to verify "a national bibliographic information sources would enable the researchers of Hacettepe University, Faculty of Medicine to access bibliographic information of publications in their fields in a short time and comprehensive way" as our research hypothesis. In our study, it was researched that whether a scientist is in need of Turkish medical literature or not. If they do, how they access such literature and if they don't what the reasons are. The effect of bibliographic sources on this subject is also analyzed. We have applied a questionnaire that was formed of 1 1 questions to 157 researchers in Hacettepe University, Faculty of Medicine. According to our findings the majority of those researchers believe that it is beneficial to follow the Turkish medical literature. 95% of those, who follow the literature think that they don't access the whole bibliographic information. 86.8% of the others do not follow the Turkish medical literature because of the lack of such bibliographic sources which enables to access bibliographic information of publications easily and quickly. IV General findings stress that the construction of a national medical index for the Turkish medical literature, would enable the researchers a comprehensive and quick access to information. Also it would increase the percentage of reading the literature as well. The main proposal in that respect is that most related individuals and institutions should come together, organize a team which consists of experts and gather their studies which are insufficient and disorganized, and optimize their effort and time. The studies should be done under the responsibility of an institution or an organization