Yesterday, Ruth directed me to an editorial in BMJ (2005;331:1487-1488) by Dean Giustini, How Google is changing medicine (free online). I think it is a fitting article to wrap up the 2005 year on this blog.

Podcast may be the word of the year, but Google has transformed society's information searching behavior, becoming an action verb in today's language. How many times has the phrase "Oh wait let me Google that," come across your lips or ears. Finding anything from theories about the show Lost to medical answers, people turn to Google when they want answers to their questions.

Not only are librarians questioning and examining their services, their roles, and their future in a Google searching and thinking society, Robert Greenwald, M.D. wonders about the role of the physician and Google. "Are we physicians no longer needed? Is an observer who can accurately select the findings to be entered in a Google search all we need for a diagnosis to appear, as if by magic? The cases presented at clinicopathological conferences can be solved easily; no longer must the discussant talk at length about the differential diagnosis of fever with bradycardia. Even worse, the Google diagnostician might be linked to an evidence-based medicine database, so a computer could e-mail the prescription to the e-druggist with no human involvement needed. " (N Engl J Med 2005;353: 2089-90 free online)

In the BMJ editorial Dean Giustini mentions that Google won the battle of the search engines and is now gaining significant ground in the battle of the scholarly information. "Within a year of its release Google Scholar has led more visitors to many biomedical journal websites than has PubMed (J Sack, personal communication, 2005). Once they discover it, many medical students and doctors prefer Google Scholar."

Google and Google Scholar have their drawbacks as Giustini and others illustrate. Scholar is just as secretive as it's parent, Google. Researchers have no idea what is in the "scholarly" database and whether true academic articles are being plucked up by the search engine. We also don't know how often Google Scholar updates itself. As Rita Vine of SiteLines mentions in her post, Google Scholar is a Full Year Late Indexing PubMed Content, Google Scholar is missing up to a full year worth of material and "No serious researcher interested in current medical information or practice excellence should rely on Google Scholar for up to date information." (FYI Krafty performed Rita's search and found that Google Scholar is now missing 1,143,648 PubMed citations. That is over 1 million citations missing!)

Giustini notes Google Scholar may be good for "serendipitous discovery, not for literature reviews," but it can be helpful when used in conjunction with other resources such as PubMed, Cochrane, UpToDate, or a "good medical librarian."

How do you see society changing to a Googling society? What are the benefits and limitations and how can we exploit them to our (librarians, doctors, educators, etc.) advantage to grow our services and knowledge. I don't think Google will cause the extinction of our professions as a whole, but it will definitely require our professions to evolve. As our professions evolve there will be those individuals who can not or simply will not evolve and they will fall prey to the Google and future technologies.