Bibliographic information retrieval in the field of artificial nutrition

The enormous amount of data available for clinical and research purposes ha s made information searching a complex task. We have designed a study to de termine which bibliographic databases provide appropriate information for t he field of artificial nutrition. Of the 149 databases consulted in the pre liminary search, 15 were found to contain an appreciable number of titles r elated to our field. As a general result, we found that MEDLINE had the largest number of titles but other databases oriented toward more specific topics contained referen ces that were unique to them. The results show that an exhaustive search fo r any topic concerning artificial nutrition must be done on MEDLINE, EM BAS E and Current Contents (75% productivity). These can be complemented with o thers according to their specialization in the subject to be treated. To ob tain productivity over 75%, from five to seven databases must be consulted, according to the item under study.