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: +1-301 480 0872.

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

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.