Aims of the Foundation

The growing availability of a large amount of information provided by the Internet can be disorienting and missleading. This page attempts to provide a simple and concise guide to access and evaluate medical information.

The exchange of reliable medical information occurs primarily trough specialized journals. The Institute for Scientific Information has developed a ranking system of these journals based on their quotation frequency and thus on their impact on the scientific community. The frequency with which the articles of a given journal are quoted reflects their value as a reference to other professionals and thus is an objective way to asses their scientific impact. This Impact Factor if greater than 1 generally indicates a journal of above average level. Another very important concept is that of the 'peer review process'. Reliable scientific information is published after it has been thoroughly reviewed by experts in the field or 'peers'. This allows some sort of control over the credibility of the information provided. All major medical journals implement this mechanism.

The most extensive and easily accessible database of medical literature is unquestionably the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. This site provides access to comprehensive literature searches which can be performed by subject or author trough PubMed. This resource can thus be utilized not only to pull out articles on a given subject but also to assess the scientific production of any health professional which generally reflects his experience and professional value. By evaluating the Impact Factor of the journals in which a given professional has published one can have a sense of the quality of the scientific production which might be more relevant than the total amount of published material.

A very reliable source of information on cancer for the general public can be found at the National Cancer Institute.