Some papers that caught my eye

Here are some recent papers that caught my attention:

CRB-65 predicts death from community acquired pneumonia, by T. Bauer and others, in Journal of Internal Medicine 2006; 260: 93-101. CURB is a score comprising confusion, blood-urea nitrogen, respiratory rate and blood pressure.

Censorship of medical journals, by S. Hickey, a letter in BMJ 2006; 333: 45. This argues that because Medline has no explicit guidelines to help it decide what journals to index, it tends to ignore journals that don't "conform to the conventional paradigm". A rapid response points out that it doesn't index papers from certain statistical journals, and so will miss papers of obvious medical importance. As the writer of the rapid response points out, these papers are picked up in Web of Science. The immediate message from this present librarian is: sometimes you need to search in more than one database to ensure that nothing is missed.

The BMJ reports a NEJM letter in which Chinese scientists report that a man who died of suspected SARS in November 2003 in fact died of H5N1 avian influenza. The BMJ letter is here, and the NEJM letter is available free here.

Nature presents a composite picture of the scientific research that was going on during the longest day, 21 June.