[Some aspects on medical research systems at the medical school in Belgrade]

The ongoing development of new technologies is rapidly expanding the number and/or quality of medical researches. In order to evaluate the situation in our country we analysed master - degree and doctoral thesis that have been done at the Belgrade Medical School in 1987., 1990. and 1994. year. These years have been chosen because of medical knowledge's known rate of exponential growth. According to the main tasks of medical research: data management system and data analyses, we classified medical researches in two major categories: prospective and retrospective. The crucial difference is whether or not the investigators collect new data for analyses. First has been discovered in 11 doctoral and 10 master theses out of 225 reviewed. Medical researchers use variety of different database management systems and statistical techniques to store, retrieve and analyse data. These were identified in respectively 23 percent and 24 percent. Beside these major research activities we were interested in usage of application programmes such as text processors or graphical packages that were found in 28 percent and 20 percent of analysed theses. In summary, technological advances in computer hardware and software have reduced the barriers to long - term storage and processing of rich biomedical data. The development of new techniques for analysing such a data also encourages the discovery and validation of new medical relationships.