ARE MEDICAL MAILING LISTS RELIABLE SOURCES OF PROFESSIONAL ADVICE

Professional mailing lists are one of the more useful and popular medi cal resources on the Internet. Some concern has been raised about the reliability of these uncontrolled forums. We have studied some quality aspects of a subset of Internet mailing lists on nephrology. From Nov ember 1996 to March 1997 the mailing lists NEPHROL, PDIAL-L and HYPERT EL were studied. The subscribers that posted, and a representative sam ple of the total number of subscribers of each list, were searched in the Medline(R) Silver-Platter database, and their individual impact fa ctors were obtained from the Science Citation Index(R). In addition, t he first authors of the original articles, and short communications fr om the more established nephrology journals, were searched similarly, in order to compare the mailing lists with the journals. NEPHROL was t he most active list (7 postings/day on average). HYPERTEL had the best average impact factor among the subscribers who posted(6.6). In gener al, the journals showed higher average impact factors than the mailing lists, but without statistically significant differences. HYPERTEL, P DIAL-L and NEPHROL are high quality nephrology mailing lists, and can be considered as a complement to the specialized nephrology journals.