Biomedical Organizations: A Worldwide Guide to Position Documents

Citation

Lindsay, M. (2006), "Biomedical Organizations: A Worldwide Guide to Position Documents", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 9, pp. 648-649. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610706923

There are five different types of position documents. They include discussion, policy papers, resolutions, statements of principle and declarations of organizations. The author examines the historical development of these papers. Position documents are largely an American invention, and the majority of biomedical organizations in the United States maintain or have developed one or more position documents. According to the Society for Neuroscience (1999) “scientific societies exist for many purposes, one of which is to establish guidelines for responsible conduct within the field they represent”. There is apparently, some cachet attached to establishing such documents. It is claimed that position documents impart an aura of scholarship to the issuing organization. They indicate that a society has taken a position on a particular topic. Biomedical organizations define the place they occupy in their specific field which then becomes their proud heritage. Still others desire to be authoritative in the face of controversy.

Position statements can be used to clarify the specialty's viewpoint in areas that range from the undisputed to the controversial. Some biomedical organizations issue position documents as a means of establishing a track record on specific issues. Biomedical organizations have differing methods of position document delivery. Many organizations post position documents only on their Websites; however, other organizations publish their position documents in the official journal representing their organization, and then post them on their Websites.

As this is a book of lists, it is appropriate to carefully examine the indexing. While acknowledging that “relatively few biomedical organizations outside the United States have developed position documents”, the entries remain inconsistent. The Royal College of Nursing in Australia is included but not our United Kingdom organization. The British Medical Association is well represented with many entries on policies. The British Geriatrics Society has 27 entries, mostly on health promotion. The American Academy of Pediatrics has 479 and the American Academy of Family Physicians has 244 on health policies. Cross referencing is omitted where there are entries on “Elder abuse” in the American Academy of Family Physicians and “The abuse of older people” in the British Geriatrics Society. But “Alternative medicine” is referred to as “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” and “Latex” is referred to as “latex allergy”.

The relevance of this book for British researchers is questionable because of the overemphasis on American and Canadian organizations represented in the text. The author spent several years searching internet databases representing biomedical professionals and health related special interest groups and he admits that hundreds of such organizations have not established any position documents and only 30 per cent responded to 500 email requests for information. The basic purpose of this book is to identify what biomedical organizations were thinking about in the early twenty‐first century. It is important that the time specific limit is identified because reliance on electronic entries depends on commitment of designers to enter data regularly. The book fails to live up to its claim of being a “worldwide guide”. The author shares the librarian's aim to “save the time of the reader”, but the result is a book which may not meet the research needs of British academics, particularly listing websites without any evaluation of their content.