Determinación del grado de conocimiento sobre fuentes de información que poseen los especialistas en una entidad biomédica con labor docente e investigativa

The determination of the knowledge health specialists have about the information sources is very useful to select adequate sources of this type. The identification of the differences existing among experts of different categories, according to their professional level is of interest, too. A representative sample made up of 28 professors (36.84%) was taken from the professional population of a teaching - research entity. They were distributed according to their teaching categories. An interview was made that allowed to determine the level of knowledge they had on information sources for their research topics. A comprehensive bibliographic search of every research topic was carried out through Medline. It was established the number of known and unknown journals, as well as the percentages of relevant references in each group of journals. In order to determine the relationship between professional level and knowledge degree, the Spearman correlation degree, as well as the Kruskal-Wallis' variance analysis test were used to demonstrate the existence of significant differences by categories and in relation to the number of known journals. It was proved that the level of knowledge of experts on information sources suitable for their research topics is very low, since they were able to identify only 15% of the total of relevant and useful sources according to the results produced by Medline. The level of relevance found in the known journals was just 20.37%. There is an absence of correlation between the professional level and the knowledge degree on information sources. The variance analysis did not show marked differences among the various categories concerning the number of known journals. The selection of adequate information sources for a specific biomedical subject requires the joint participation of information specialists and experts in the studied thematic area. The size of the sample used does not permit to make generalizations on larger populations.