An Open Letter to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt

By PHILIP LEDERER, MD Guys: You don’t know me, but I’m a physician and loyal gmail user writing for your help improving Google Scholar. As Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information” and you are Google’s CEO and Executive Chairman, respectively, I’ll bet you can make this happen. As you probably know, academic medicine is focused on writing grants and publishing papers. Physician-researchers try to discover new knowledge but to do so we must apply for grants from the NIH or industry. In order to get a grant, we need to publish papers that will make the funders trust us with their money. But how do physicians learn how to write convincing grants after so many years in the hospital taking care of patients? The short answer is practice. Grants and papers are built upon the scaffolding of previously published research studies, i.e. the vast medical literature. We jump in and read articles, design and conduct studies, analyze the data, write it up and hopefully publish it. I’m interested in how computers can help us organize medical information. When I worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) I used Endnote software on my Mac but that didn’t work out well because the software crashed frequently. When I moved to Boston, I started downloading PDFs of articles from the Harvard Medical School library, annotating them, and storing them in Google Drive. I also tried Google Scholar but it didn’t let me...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs