Dear colleagues,
The news has been seeping out of Washington that NIAAA has
decided to discontinue ETOH (http://etoh.niaaa.nih.gov/) , the database
they have funded for many years for the alcohol research field. I don't
know about you, but I am really dismayed by this news -- I use it
several times every day. I am writing a letter to Dr. T.K. Li, the
Director of NIAAA, asking that the decision be reversed. I encourage
you to do likewise, or anything else that you can think of to influence
this not happening. The address is: Dr. Ting Kai Li, Director,
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), 6000
Executive Boulevard - Willco Building, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-7003,
U.S.A. The fax number is: +1-301 443 7787.
Below is most of the material from my letter, as an example.
There is more chance of being effective if each person writing tells
their own story. -- Robin
<from my letter:>
I am writing to urge you to reconsider any
decision by NIAAA to terminate support for ETOH.
I am writing you from the perspective of someone
who works in social science, epidemiological and treatment systems
research. From my experience of cross-disciplinary supervision at ARF,
I know that the world of searching, accessing and referencing relevant
materials looks very different to social science researchers than it
does to biological researchers. Routinely, it is my experience, social
science researchers work with literatures that are broader and spread
through a much longer timeframe than many biological researchers.
Also, in social science, unlike most biomedical science, books and
chapters in books are often media for primary scientific communication.
Particularly because it seems to me the disciplinary perspectives on a
service like ETOH may well differ, I thought it might be helpful to you
to hear a view from the social science side.
In my work as a researcher, I use ETOH several times each day. This is
admittedly partly a matter of convenience - I know that when I go to
ETOH, I don't need to put in "alcohol" as a search term. ETOH also
provides me with a handy reference to some article when I need it - all
I have to do is mark the item, press "save", and groom the item down to
the right reference format.
But ETOH's utility is not simply a matter of convenience. It is an
invaluable resource for finding relevant literature. I am often
surprised by new references which ETOH reveals on a topic which I
thought I knew like the back of my hand. Still more, when I am working
my way into a topic concerning alcohol with which I am not so familiar,
ETOH is a reliable guide to the shape and scope of the literature. A
couple of hours of searching in ETOH's "abstract" field will produce a
pile of useful abstracts printed out, and make clear to me what I need
to read.
In my parts of the alcohol field, there is nothing that comes near it.
PubMed and PsycInfo are certainly enormously useful as general
databases, but they are not nearly as good, useful, and wideranging as
ETOH in the alcohol field. ETOH covers nearly three times as many
journals in the alcohol field as PubMed. Unlike PubMed, it also
includes government reports, books and monographs, often indexing the
separate chapters where there are separately-authored chapters. Having
dissertations in the alcohol field in the same database as other
references is also a valuable feature of ETOH. (In its early years, ETOH
also captured much of the "grey literature" of state reports, etc., and
the literature is the weaker from the fact that this aspect got
dropped.)
It has been a source of frustration for me that there is nothing like
ETOH for other drugs, and I have twice buttonholed NIDA directors at
meetings and asked them to consider supporting an add-on to ETOH to
cover drugs as well as alcohol - unfortunately with no effect. ETOH
functionally replaced the "second section" of the old Journal of Studies
on Alcohol, which performed the main bibliographic and abstracting
function for the field through the early 1980s. If ETOH were
discontinued, the field would be without its own comprehensive
bibliographic resource for the first time in more than 60 years.
As a resource supported by the U.S. taxpayer, the primary function of
ETOH must of course be for U.S.-based researchers. But you should
realize that ETOH serves as well as a flagship and source of prestige
for NIAAA overseas. Nothing else conveys to me on a daily basis the
preeminence of the U.S. in the alcohol research field, and among alcohol
researchers globally I think there is no other service or product of
NIAAA that would be so sorely missed.
I hope you will find these comments helpful. I would be happy to
provide any further advice or response that might be helpful to you.
_____________
And now for something different ...
A snippet from a story about the bombing of an upscale Baghdad
restaurant on New Year's Eve, from the Australian ABC
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1019228.htm):
The owners of many upscale Baghdad restaurants are considering stopping
the sale of wine and liquor, hoping to reduce the number of their
foreign patrons and avoid attracting the attention of Iraqi insurgents.