Evaluating the MEDLINE Core Clinical Journals filter: data-driven evidence assessing clinical utility

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Medical Informatics
• Information Science

Background:

• MEDLINE's Core Clinical Journals filter aims to identify clinically useful publications.
• The effectiveness of this filter for clinical decision-making is not well-established.
• Internal Medicine Morning Reports utilize a specific set of patient-related literature.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the MEDLINE Core Clinical Journals filter.
• To compare the filter's journal selection with literature used in Internal Medicine Morning Reports.
• To assess the filter's utility for patient-centric decision-making.

Main Methods:

• Bibliometric analysis of 628 articles used in Internal Medicine Morning Reports (2007-2012).
• Application of Bradford's law of scattering to rank journal clinical utility.
• Calculation of recall and precision for Core and non-Core journals.

Main Results:

• Only 30% of clinically used articles and 16% of journals were from the Core Clinical Journals filter.
• 55% of the top 20 Bradford-ranked journals were Core titles.
• Low precision (<50%) and recall (<50%) were observed for most Morning Report subjects, with many showing 0% precision and recall.

Conclusions:

• The Core Clinical Journals filter shows limited relevance for hospital-based internal medicine.
• Clinically valuable journals may differ from those deemed academically important.
• The MEDLINE filter requires review and updates to better serve current clinical information needs.