Indian Journal of Medicine 2011;1:2-3

Editorial
The Making of Database of Medical Research in India
Emmanuel Bhaskar

Department of Medicine, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai, India

*corresponding author email: drebhaskar@gmail.com

Published online on 9th February 2011

Copyright © 2011 Bhaskar E. This is an open-access article . The publisher and author permit unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The core objective of health related research is to identify problems in a community, assess the
magnitude of health care issues and evolve interventions to solve them. Traditional epidemiology
has taught us that community and hospital based research focusing health aspects form the
fundamentals to build preventive and curative health strategies. Despite the claimed growing
economy in India, we continue to rely on western data to develop methods to solve our health
problems. The so call evidence in health management is skewed towards the west, justifying its
method with an opinion that majority of Indian and probably Asian research is of poor
methodological quality and frequently of small sample size. Though the argument appears to be
acceptable, leads to western guidelines which may not be applicable to India and many other
developing countries. Hence it is imperative that we bring together the health related research data
from India for observation and development of management strategies which is more practical to
our country. Furthermore, original research done in India is often under - reported since we do not
have an effective national database of our research [global databases like Pubmed and Embase yield
a low number of Indian articles due to unclear reasons]. Database of Medical Research in India
[DMRI] will attempt to solve this problem by developing a resource for the Indian health experts to
assess and analyze community and hospital epidemiology data which should hopefully culminate in
policies and protocols which will benefit our fellow citizens majority of whom are happy with their
farming occupation.

DMRI , as already described in the accompanying editorial is an online resource of health related
original research articles published from India accessible at http://www.dmri.in.1 The database is
developed by editors who are predominantly doctors whose major responsibility as a DMRI editor is
to identify articles published in various specialities of medicine and create a series of web friendly
data on published articles. This will be subsequently uploaded to our database. Since most of the
Indian journals have their online archives only from the year 2003, our database is prepared from
2003 to current.

While searching for articles in any database, a visitors objective is to identify all articles on the
topic of interest. Even with the best search engine, the yield is only around 70%. Since the total
number of research articles published in any given area of interest is expected to be low on account
of sub-optimal funding in our country we wished to devise the database in a way that the search
yield is as close to 100%. This led to a method by which we fragmented the specialities into
subspecialities and further into sub-groups. For instance, if a visitor wishes to search research

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articles on heart failure published from India, he has to enter the cardiology section and look under
heart failure to get all the relevant articles . Each article has a link to its full-text on the relevant
journal's page.

Though it is my major career objective to develop such a database, the thought would not have
blossomed without the academic motivation from my postgraduate chief and mentor
Prof.S.Shivakumar, the editor-in-chief of Indian Journal of Medicine. In a time when funding plays an
important role in health research globally, we have struggled to get a sustainable funding for the
project. But for my generous colleagues Dr.K.N.Viswanathan, Dr.G.Sowmya, Dr.B.Vijayalaksmi,
Dr.N.Senthil Kumar and Dr.S.Ramalakshmi who dedicated their valuable time and edited major
speciality pages for accuracy of content and web-link without any honorarium, it would have been
impossible to reach this platform which broadcasts Indian medical research to fellow countrymen
and possibly to the world.

Conflict of Interest: Is a member of journal’s editorial board

References:

1. Shivakumar S. Indian Journal of Medicine: an open e-journal for physicians. Indian J Med 2011;1:1