Redefinition of community standards through evidence

This article in the NY Times (free registration required) reports on how Google is planning to use the frequency of search terms in various US communities to show that those previously defined as being outside the community standard are in fact more frequently used than "apple pie". On the one hand, this trend is likely to grow and may likely do so even in medicine (to define the standard of care from the data rather than from the experts interpreting the data). On the other hand, just because the majority follows a particular practice does not make it best, optimal, desirable or even necessarily permissible. It does however, shed considerable light on double standards of various stripes.

Blogosphere mapped!

This map of the blogosphere reveals both the political lay of the very densely populated land of blogs and the degrees of authoritativeness that each blog appears to hold. Where is the equivalent for the medical bibliome?

Pubmed central compliance trends

Just heard some very positive news from David Lipman at the NCBI. It does seem that investigators are responding very positively to the new mandate. Just in the last month, author submissions to Pubmed Central (PMC) have increased by at least a factor of five. The author-contributed manuscripts now exceed the journal contributed manuscripts. It also appears that at least 60% of the expected manuscripts are being submitted to PMC. NIH appears to be well on the way to capturing the vast majority of the published output of NIH-funded science which is a wonderful result for the scientific community and the public which it serves.

Harvard CTSC

As announced, Harvard University has been awarded a Clinical Translational Science Award. The Informatics Program is one of 10 programs in the Harvard CTSA and represents a trans-University collaboration whose initial plans are described here.