Week 2 Part 2 Task 5: Database Research

“A database is an organized collection of data.” [1] These are useful for accessing large amount of information from one location. I used databases while I was working in a research lab at UMDNJ. We did biomedical research observing the effects of fructose on the kidney and liver systems. In order to formulate hypothesis and experiments, the first step is to do a review of the literature that has already been published. This will allow us to gather background information as well as to see if the proposed experiment we want to do has already been done. A major source used through the lab was from a public database from the National Institute of Health called MEDLINE® accessed through PubMed®.

MEDLINE ® is a massive database of over 20 million references to articles published in approximately 5,600 current biomedical journals from the United States and over 80 foreign countries. MEDLINE® contains journal citations and abstracts for biomedical literature n the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences. [2] PubMed ® is a service of the US National Library of Medicine® (NLM) that provides free access to MEDLINE®. [3] PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering topics in life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other molecular biology resources. Journals go as far back as 1946 and as far forward as today. Currently, citations from 5,600 journals are in 39 languages; 60 languages for older journals [4]

While I was working on a research project, I was able to use this database to find journals about new techniques to improve the quality of our work. Also, it allowed me to gather information for other experiments that helped me prove why I should look at certain genes or proteins during my experiments. I was also able to learn basic information about the kidney and liver systems, which were the main areas of our research, all from one database. The database contained all the information about the journal for which the article came from for proper citations. I was also able to save a list of all the journals I looked at and email articles to myself or other memebers of my lab.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

[2] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/usemedline.html

[3] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/pubmed.html

[4] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html

1. What specific challenges does your database system implementation have?

 MEDLINE currently has citations and abstracts from approximately 5,400 biomedical journals published in the United States and worldwide. Coverage extends back to 1948. This is a lot of journals. However it is not all of them. Although it collects journals from all over the world it does not have every journal from every country. Another database center could find a way to collect all journals and would be a better source than this one. Also, the coverage only goes back as far as 1948. This is not as serious of a problem due most researchers want current information. However, there could be very important studies that were performed prior to this date that could be beneficial to our research.

2. In what ways does it provide competitive advantage for the organization using it?

While there are some limitations to this database there are also great positives. PubMed® provides free access to MEDLINE and links to full text articles whenever possible. MEDLINE® contains journal citations and abstracts for biomedical literature n the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences from all around the world. There are a large number of journals and my research lab was able to do a thorough literature review for our research projects. Finding information that is already out there saved our lab money and time since we did not have to perform the preliminary experiments ourselves.

For citations added from 2005-2009: about 45% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 91% are published in English, and about 83% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles. [4] This is important for my lab because the majority of the researcher spoke only English. This feature allowed us access to research from non-English speaking countries that we otherwise would miss out on.

3. What improvements would you suggest?

My suggestion would be to collect more journals to add to the already large database. It would be great if there were one destination to go to for all of your research needs. This may seem like a stretch, but every effort to make it as much as a reality as possible should be executed. I would also suggest that the database gather journals from a larger range of topics, gathering journals from more fields.