| Use your information; literacy skills to digest complex clinical research information. Helena Korjonen-Close at the Institute of Clinical Research explains how
As a pharmaceutical professional, you may be subject to a number of external pressures, either in the completion of postgraduate studies or to employment in the industry. Your job may involve researching topics and summarising findings in regular reports. You may work to standards such as evidence-based medicine (EBM), looking for the best available evidence for a treatment before discussing your company’s requirements in marketing a new drug to the NHS. Whichever the case, it’s certain that on a daily basis you will require access to some form of information, through emails, reports or browsing the web.
The way in which you find information, digest it and reuse it, is also affected by internal pressures; lack of time, your literacy skills, your means of access and the standard of resources available to you (1-3). All these pressures, together with an increased amount of articles, reports and guidelines to read, will overwhelm you and cause what we call ‘information overload’.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND INFORMATION LITERACY
It isn’t only the amount of information available that causes this phenomenon. It’s “the complexity of knowledge content supported, the dependencies on a technology platform and host system, or the proof of use and content sharing across multiple and varying environments” that add to the feeling of being ‘overloaded’ with information, suggests Hoelzer et al (4). You are not only using print material, you are accessing emails, webbased material, searching databases and you will use different sets of skills in handling these differing resources. These skills are called information literacy skills.
“Information Literacy encompasses knowledge of one’s information concerns and needs, and the ability to identify, locate, evaluate, organize and effectively create, use and communicate information to address issues or problems at hand; it is a prerequisite for participating effectively in the Information Society, and is part of the basic human right of life long learning” (5). The only way to reduce the feeling of information overload is to “improve upon the basic skills required to allow efficient and accurate searches and evaluations of the literature”, argues Hise et al (6). |
