Tracking down conference abstracts is a problem even within the
pharmaceutical industry.
Where conferences are organised by specialist medical and scientific
societies the abstracts are sometimes produced as special issues of their
journals. However, copies are not sent to institutional subscribers, nor
included in the electronic versions of these journals. Yet the posters are
often the first place important information appears and are commonly cited
in other papers. In the age of evidence-based medicine this is yawning gap.
Some major medical indexes do include conference abstracts (presumably
where they get their hands on them). A colleague in 3M USA investigated
this last year and reported:
Medline / PubMed does not index posters.
Embase in 2001 indexed 36,000 papers from conferences, 4000 of these items
were posters. 'Embase is the premier database for pharmaceutical / drug
information so that number probably includes most major conferences' said
the publishers.
Biosis does index posters from meetings where they index the abstracts and
has since 1993. They should be picked up in any search of the Biosis
database. Biosis is a database of the biological sciences so will have a
broad approach to covering meetings.
Scisearch includes these for the top 500 journals (ranked by impact factor)
beginning in 1989. Posters are coded with a "meeting abstract" document
type.
UK pharmaceutical companies are obliged to have Medical Information
departments to answer detailed enquiries from health professionals about
the company's products. Addressing enquiries specifically to them may
produce a better response.
Andrew Poole
Information Officer
3M Health Care Limited
BeST Information Services, Morley Street, Loughborough, LE11 1EP
Email: [log in to unmask] Tel:(01509)613302 Fax:(01509)613164
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