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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (78785)	3/1/2003 6:09:44 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I don't think the answer is free access, I think the answer is better paid access to full journal articles. PubMed is a lifesaver, literally, available all over the world to health care providers and patients all over the world. Very few of the complete articles are available online at any cost, they just aren't published online, except for the larger publications in larger countries like the US and Great Britain. Many of the journals abstracted come from foreign countries. Japan and Taiwan are especially advanced in this area, but I've read stuff from all over Europe, and to a lesser extent Latin America and the Middle East, typically in translation in a Western publication. I can tell a lot about a country's scienctific advancement by reading abstracts of medical research. In China, for example, much of the research involves traditional medicines, and the same could be said for Eastern Europe. In most areas I have researched, Japan's research just blows everybody else out of the water, except the US and in some areas I've researched it's better. There's no rip off of private industry involved in this database. The abstracts are free, but the abstracts aren't enough for serious research. If you want the entire journal article, you usually have to download it directly from the publisher, or else pay somebody to copy it out of a medical library and fax it to you or mail it to you. If you're a real physician or researcher, you can contact the researchers directly via email in order to bypass the publisher, and my experience is that they are willing to discuss things with me, even though I identifiy myself as a patient. It's a wonderful resource. One of the great things our country does that goes unnoticed.