O sistema MEDLINE no Brasil: uma avaliação parcial de seu desempenho

Abstract

A partial evaluation of the performance of MEDLINE system in Brazil. The data obtained in a questionnaire received from two hundred and twenty biomedical users stated that the system is more used by professionals graduated between 1949/53 and 1966/71. It also presented the low frequency of use of the system by the community of users as well as the Brazilian titles included in its data base and considered important by the biomedical community. A second questionnaire was sent only to the MEDLINE uses to test their degree of satisfaction and was retrieved from twenty seven users. Is stated that was a major "moderately helpful" checked by forty one per cent of the users as relevant to their information needs. Two searches were performed in order to study the citations included in the 1977 issues of the most important Brazilian biomedical titles. One of them consisted in selecting the seventy more cited titles and compare them with the MEDLINE file. The other consisted of a citation pool of five hundred references also to be matched against the MEDLINE file. The medial of them determined that the MEDLINE file has a percentage of seventy per cent of adequacy of the Brazilian users needs. There were no data that provided other conclusions and just a few on how well the system is being operated, on the relationship cost-benefits and on the percentage of pieces of information that are relevant to the users and can be retrieved through MEDLINE system. The MEDLINE is vital to the Brazilian biomedical community but it needs parallel literature searching for retrospective serach or current awareness purposes. To further test this evaluation other searches must be carried on by the librarians and BIREME and based on studies already performed by American librarians.