The Latin American and Caribbean Center for Health Sciences Information (BIREME) went on a mission in Argentina in order to disseminate the importance of the Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences – LILACS database, a key tool for decision making based on evidence and for reducing health inequities.
The visit took place during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Central Library of the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, carried out on July 4 and attended by authorities, professionals and users of the Hospital, as well as colleagues from the Red Nacional de Información en Ciencias de la Salud – RENICS. A presentation entitled “The LILACS database: its importance in the Region, statistics and diffusion of the MyVHL service” was included in the program and carried out by Sueli Mitiko Yano Suga, Supervisor of the field of Referential Information Sources at BIREME/PAHO/WHO.
Argentina was noticed for being the third country in the Region with the largest number of indexed documents in the LILACS database (2006-2019) , with 56,345 entered registries from a total of 877,393. Sueli Suga highlighted the opportunity of reinforcing the criteria of selection and permanence of scientific journals in LILACS in terms of content, open access criteria, periodicity and punctuality quality data and published according to the best editorial practices.
The presentation also described the service offered by BIREME known as “MyVHL”, which stores user information and preferences in order to offer personalized adjustments, such as the creation of collections of selected documents from the Virtual Health Library (VHL), the definition of topics of interest for receiving alerts, a search history and a list of favorite links. MyVHL works directly in BIREME’s regional search portal and is available as an application on mobile devices.
The InfoButton project was also highlighted, as the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, a PAHO/WHO collaborating center, will be the institution responsible for testing the system, which aims to increase possibilities of facilitating use of evidence as a support for clinical decisions. In a simplified way, it is a standard mechanism for clinical information systems to request information from resources/sources of information available online and that are specific to a certain clinical context.
Finally, Sueli Suga commented of the numerous ways of accessing LILACS, through its own portal, from the Virtual Health Libraries or in different applications such as MyVHL and the eBlueInfo, the latter being destined for primary health care professionals.
Within the framework of BIREME’s mission, a meeting was held with the coordination of the Red Nacional de Información en Ciencias de la Salud (RENICS), responsible for sending over 56 thousand registries to LILACS, as well as for 121 indexed Argentinean journals that are in process of reevaluation in the collection.
With the objective of broadening even more the visibility and access of almost 880,000 documents from 26 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean registered in LILACS, which is the most researched database in the Regional Portal of the Virtual Health Library, strategic meetings were held with the PAHO/WHO Representation team in Argentina and its Center of Knowledge Management, the Dirección de Investigación para Salud de la Secretaria de Gobierno de Salud and the Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CAICYT/CONICET).
Source materials
PAHO/WHO Argentina News: The importance of health databases for decision making based on evidence. Available at: https://www.paho.org/arg/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10356:destacan-la-importancia-de-base-de-datos-en-salud-para-la-toma-de-decisiones-basadas-en-evidencia&Itemid=224. Accessed on July 21, 2019 (in Spanish)
Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires. Celebration of our Library’s 50th anniversary. Available at: https://www.hospitalitaliano.org.ar/?fbclid=IwAR3ROqGjwb7eFx1gPH0JTej6I8omYQZ5ATMHtybaU0f1Ttd138Ys93pqXdk#!/edu/home/principal/noticia/78405. Accessed on July 21, 2019 (in Spanish)
RENICS. RENICS Work groups – 2018. Available at: http://www.renics.org.ar/. Accessed on 21, 2019 (in Spanish)