Annals of Family Medicine Is 1 Year Old: So What and Who Cares?

Dear Dr. Larry Green and the Editors of this Journal:

I would like to add to your interesting editorial, the comments of the readers and the answer of the editor, that Annals of Family Medicine is the electronic journal that all researchers in family or general medicine and primary care in the world were waiting since many years ago.

It is impossible when I receive the table of contents by email of the Annals of Family Medicine that I don't open at least one or two articles of this very interesting journal dedicated to publish solutions to scientific research problems and methodology.

Two things very important of this new century deserve a comment between parenthesis: First, readers have lost the interest in reading the printed version of the journals --and books, if they can have them online sooner than the printed version. Now, the library is where the PC is. Second, the resource poor countries are been privileged by the free online access to the great PubMed database and some excellent online general medicine journals as this, unfortunately not by all, and this simultaneous sharing of so valuable scientific knowledge of the resource rich countries with them is very important for the improvement of global health. Nevertheless, happily most of the journals --not all yet-- can be freely accessed by the marvelous WHO Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (Hinari).

The last issue on "Family Medicine Research for Improving Heath Globally" has been a very pretty surprise for me in my silent efforts researching in family medicine, and teaching and mentoring their residents and professors for 17 years in Managua and Havana, to increase the rigorous scientific research in their primary care systems and family medicine programs.

I hope your journal continues successfully as until today, and can help the Wonca, AAFP, NAPCRG, PAHO, WHO, COHRED, GFHR, World Bank, and many other main governmental and non-governmental supporters of research in the world, to increase the amount and quality of family medicine research and results in North America, the Caribbean, and in the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, up-to-date most of the funding for health research in the world is going to the biomedical basic, applied and industrial laboratories, and to the hospitals, and very few funds are dedicated to the health primary care centers and practices. That is another 10/90 gap in health research funding that will be corrected in the future, in the measure that the family physicians can demonstrate that the research in the fantastic community laboratories is also serious, rigorous, useful, and can impact global health too.

To achieve so very ambitious goal, the scientific research and methodological issues published by the Annals of Family Medicine is crucial.

Many thanks to the publishers, editors, and authors.

Good luck in your very serious endeavor!

Respectfully,

RJ Stusser, MD

First Cuban international member of the AAFP

Competing interests:   None declared

Regarding Larry Green's note on the Annals, year one. I would add the following comment:

As a member of the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine, I recently got an announcement that the Index Medicus is being discontinued as a written document. The Index will continue to be electronic but production of the big bound volumes that populate whole floors of medical libraries will be ended. Just as the Annals reaches inclusion in the Index, it becomes electronic.

While the younger members of our discipline have spent their lives mostly online, the passing of the hardbound Index Medicus means a lot to those of us who spent hours and hours early in our careers with thick books, scanning subject headings one by one, and, not finding what we want, proceeding to another MESH heading. The phrase, "I did a Medline and nothing has been published about........", at the beginning of a presentation always means, to me, that the presenter didn't look hard enough. This feeling may stem from past years when I would poke through library stacks and find out all sorts of stuff that was interesting and only a little related. Such "wandering" made me realize the incredible breadth of science. It also amazed me with what some journals could and would publish.

Knowledge was not always organized by search engines with Boolean logic but by people who tried to put similar things together by paging through journals. When was the last time - honestly - that you turned off your pagers and cell phones and spent a hour or two browsing print journals in a library in a chair, at a table, in the stacks, with sufficient time to daydream? The sound of the turning page has always been reassuring to me.

Having what I need in 0.13 seconds from Google amazes me, but not as much as the want ads in the back of obscure journals, giving me the opportunity to imagine what it would be like to be a doc in some other place on earth, wondering what the story was of the person who finally answered the add and went to that place. Now, with websites devoted to job placement, even the want adds are disappearing. Sic transit gloria.

Stop by your local medical library puts and see if you can purchase an old volume of the INDEX MEDICUS. Buy one, just so you can show your grandchildren what life - and the pleasures of that life - were like before OVID or PUBMED Central or Yahoo.

Sincerely,

John J. Frey III MD

Competing interests:   None declared