Chapter 04: An Interest in Journal Selection and Evaluation for the National Library of Medicine

Authors

• Albert E. Gunn JD, MD, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Allison Sáenz PhD

Files

Description

Dr. Gunn takes a few moments to discuss his work on the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee for the National Library of Medicine. A special interest of his, Dr. Gunn describes how selections were made for inclusion in Index Medicus, a bibliographic reference for medical literature, and MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online), an online database for literature retrieval. As part of his work, he helped develop a ranking system used to analyze journals for inclusion in the NLM’s resources.

Identifier

GunnAE_20240627_C04

Publication Date

7-27-2024

City

Houston, Texas

Interview Session

Albert E. Gunn, MD, Oral History Interview, July 27, 2024

Topic Covered

Professional Service beyond MD Anderson; Professional Path; Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose; Activities Outside Institution; Career and Accomplishments; Collaborations

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Disciplines

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History

Transcript

Albert E. Gunn, MD:

Well, Dr. Clark, I can’t say we were close friends, but he was (inaudible) so, and he was the boss and—but he was very supportive frankly. He used to say, “That’s good politics” like when I got on the delegate at large of the White House Conference on Handicapped Individuals. Later on, I was appointed to the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, and later, I was elected chairman of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine by the other regents. And Dr. Clark was very pleased with that, and he said to me, “That’s good politicking,” “Well,” I said, “Lee, they elected me.” So Dr. LeMaistre was kind enough to say it was peer review because the regents had to elect me to it and so on. And that was an—a side interest of mine, which I guess was a spin-off from MD Anderson is that I later became the chairman of the committee—resource committee on—technical committee on literature selection, review committee it was called I think. I’m sorry my name remembering is a little off. I think it was the—

Allison Sáenz, PhD :

No worries. I think I did see something about literature review.

Albert E. Gunn, MD:

Yeah, well, I—they appointed me the chairman of it after I finished on the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine because they thought I could do something about it. They had looked into the selection of books and articles for the Index Medicus, and they weren’t satisfied with the process they had. And Dr. Lindberg, who was the director of the National Library of Medicine, and Mr. Smith, who was the executive thing, they said, “We want you to go down there and start a committee to review the articles for inclusion in the Index Medicus and in MEDLINE, and so forth. And you’re going to have to get it going because we never had any such thing.” So I was the first chairman of it appointed, and we had three-year terms. I came up with a procedure to go—I’m sorry, this isn’t about rehab, I’m digressing a little. Allison Sáenz, PhD Oh, no, you’re totally—this interview is about you and your career at large, so please free to go—

Albert E. Gunn, MD:

Anyway, at the National Library of Medicine, they appointed people who were knowledgeable about the area. The deputy editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine was on the committee, various librarians of the Armed Services Medical School was on it, example officio. Various other people that were involved in medical publishing and literature, and some chairman of departments were on it. And we had a committee, and we would pick which journals we thought—see, there are so many journals, medical journals in existence, and it’s difficult to say which ones ought to be reference journals because some of them are just rackets. They’re advertising journals, or they’re hospital journals, or just publicity for the staff of the hospital. So which journals are the ones that people should be relying on when they’re taking care of patients? That’s the question. The New England Journal of Medicine, of course, Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, all of these prestige journals, and there’s some that are not prestige but are still very good, they’re new on the scene maybe. So somebody has to say, “This one ought to be on the Index Medicus, this one ought to be on MEDLINE.” And we’re coming in, the MEDLARS system as all of this—see the—while this is going on, we had the computer coming and the internet coming into existence. And we’re going to have publication of journals in a dimension that’s far more than it could ever be conceived before when you just had print. The Index Medicus became obsolete, I’m not sure it’s still published, is it? I guess, I don’t know if it is or isn’t, but anyway, it’s been replaced by internet search engines and things like that. And so this committee was going to have to be very selective in what it picked to be on the Index Medicus and to be in the MEDLARS System, that’s all of the various—CANCERLINE was the one for the cancer literature, MEDLINE for medical literature. They had so many lines that were being created to help with the—and this was the ground floor of it, this committee, the technical review committee. And the reason they picked that name is they didn’t want anybody to know what it was doing because they were afraid too many people would try to run it. They had a strategy Dr. Lindberg and then Mr. Smith, they’re very capable, clean, Dr. Schoolman was the deputy director, very capable and savvy people. It was a pleasure to associate with them. So off we went with our committee, and I picked a system of rating journal articles one to five, and the reason I picked that is because you have to make up your mind. If you go 1 to 10, they’re all going to give 7, but 1 to 5 you have to pick a number closer now. They tried to dodge me a little bit by doing decimals, 3.25 and so forth to get out [there?] and so they did not have to make a decision. But the one to five system was to make people make a decision, is this going to be on or not? And we picked a score, which was the dividing line and off we went. So one of the people on the committee was Dr. Lois DeBakey, the sister of Michael DeBakey, the famous heart surgeon, and she was from Houston as well. And I remember when I first was selected to be on the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, she called Dr. Glenn Knotts. Glenn Knotts was the head of publications at MD Anderson, and he knew me from work at MD Anderson in fact. And so she said, “What do you know about this, Dr. Albert Gunn?” and he told her, “Well, he’s a great guy, I know him, he—you’ll like him.” She said, “Well, I want to meet him because they’ve asked me at the National Library to check him out.” So off we went to lunch with Dr. Glenn Knotts and Lois DeBakey. And Lois DeBakey had a tremendous sense of humor, and between Glenn and I, we loved our repartee, so back and forth, she’d split her side laughing. And she called them back and said, “This Dr. Gunn is okay, you’ll like him,” and that was my entrée to the National Library of Medicine. But anyway, she was appointed this Literature Selection Technical Review Committee—at last I got the name right—and she became a very close associate of mine because we used to work together. Each committee member was assigned a certain number of journals to review and reported on them at the committee meeting. And then the whole committee discussed them and voted on each one. And that way, we picked the people for the Index Medicus. What was already on the Index Medicus, we didn’t review, although from time to time, the staff person who staffed the meeting, [Lois Collani?] would pick journals. She had questions about it for us to go over, and this usually caused quite a ruckus because people had their interests in certain journals even on the committee, and they didn’t want them taken off. So we—I can remember substantial arguments about whether certain journals should be on or off the Index Medicus. And people would get very heated about it. I won’t name the journals, but you’d be surprised at some of the very, very strong discussion that went on. We had people that weren’t afraid to give their opinion, and they didn’t back off on it very quickly. But anyway, I think it was a good committee and so did Dr. Lindberg. He was very pleased with the results, and they—we started the template, which I think is still in use for that committee to pick things for the Index Medicus. And I was the first chairman of it, I was—felt honored by, and set the system up. I think they still use it for all I know. But anyway, that’s a side issue. But it was one of the things that MD Anderson permitted me to do in my life that I really enjoyed, and it opened my horizons to so many ways.

Recommended Citation

Gunn, Albert E. JD, MD and Sáenz, Allison PhD, "Chapter 04: An Interest in Journal Selection and Evaluation for the National Library of Medicine" (2024). Interview Chapters. 1609.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1609

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