Quality assurance in health sciences literature searching: applying the ISO 9000 quality standard

Medicine is a literature-based discipline. Ensuring that the literature review which precedes a significant piece of medical research has met predetermined standards is essential. A list of items reviewed carries no guarantees that all appropriate items have been included in the survey of the literature, or that appropriate sources have been efficiently searched. This would be a matter for concern in any discipline. In medicine it is a matter of life and death. Quality assurance procedures that offer guarantees of the standards built into the process, rather than quality control which measures only outputs, can provide the necessary reassurance. The ISO 9000 quality standard offers a much needed quality assurance process. A methodology for applying the ISO 9000 standard to the task of searching the medical literature is outlined in this paper. A new role for medical librarians in promoting a rigorous methodology in the literature review equal to that of the research it supports is defined.