| dc.description.abstract | Introduction
Information disseminated by the media influences
not only individual health behaviour, but also healthcare
utilization and health policies. I Internationally,
the news media are an important source of
information on medicine and new medical
treatments for readers, including physicians and
scientists.? There are concerns that the selection of
topics, and consequently the coverage, may not:
• always be accurate.i
• depict the real achievements in medicine
described in the literature;"
• cover the real needs of the patient;
• correspond to the need of the reader (the socalled
agenda).5
The international position is also representative
of Italy.e A good journalist has to be able to access
the latest information (the sources), analyse and
filter it, assessing its quality and authoritativeness,
whilst dealing with ever-increasing sources of
information.t.o While the impact factor gives a
partial picture of the scientific importance of a
given medical journal," the criteria for filtering
medical evidence likely to become 'news' are less
stringent. The criteria are discretional and connected
to the 'values' of journalism (singularity,
practical importance, consequences on life,
geographical implications, emotions, possibility of
development, sense of expectation).
Correspondence: Flavia Bruno, Centre for Studies on Drug
Communication, University of Milan. Italy. E-mail: ftavia.bruno@unimi.it
The annual increase in the amount of published
research poses major difficulties. Overall results of
research are increasing by 5% per year, published
pages by 7-8%per year and the total of number of
journals 12000 to 20 000 (equal to 1-2 million of
articles depending on the evaluation criteria)."
Journalists are also faced with time constraints?
which make it difficult for them to scan even a few
scientific journals.
The research agenda of our Centre is to analyse
communication to different target groups in order
to improve the quality of information on health. A
pilot project commenced aimed at providing alerts
to papers on medical topics from the scientific
literature. This was in response to requests made
by some Italian scientific journalists at a press conference.
The need they expressed was clearly consistent
with our objectives.
Materials and methods
The alerting service was designed using predefined
criteria as far as possible. Medical journals were
selected on the basis of their impact factor. In the
years 2001-2003, the selection of papers was
discretional or based on their editorial comments.
In 2004 and 2005, various publisher's press alerts
where available. Articles were selected when they
had received an editorial comment or had been
mentioned in the original press alerts from
publishers. Particular attention was given to
Italian authors. All papers on medicine published
in Nature and Science were alerted (in view of the
interest indicated by our 'Observatory of the lay
press' -see below) and full papers available on the
web were considered.
Tables of contents were drawn up from subscriptions
to email services provided by publishers;
these were assessed by a biomedical graduate,
formally trained with a master's degree in scientific
communication and joumalism.!v Alerts were
based on the timely publication of selected titles | en_US |
