Eingeschränkter Zugang zur internationalen medizinischen Fachliteratur in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion

Abstract

Limited access to foreign professional literature in the former Soviet Union had consequences for public health: persistence of some outdated methods and approaches. Several examples are discussed in this letter. The shortage of foreign literature has been partly compensated by domestic editions, sometimes containing compilations from foreign sources, borrowings without references, and mistranslations. International literature is on average scarcely quoted in Russian language scientific publications. Today, however, there are grounds for optimism: the economic upturn must bring improvements.

Hormesis and homeopathy: The artificial twins

“…In conditions when commercial considerations tend to replace medical ethics, some patients try to come clear with their ailments with the help of professional literature, which is their right. However, in Russia, public access to the medical literature is limited [ 37 ].…”

Sources of information influencing decision-making in orthopaedic surgery - an international online survey of 1147 orthopaedic surgeons

“…This result should be interpreted with caution, as bias cannot therefore be excluded. The language bias is another restriction of our study, we can not be sure that number of participants and results would have been different if the survey would have been multilingual [34,35]. Knobloch described a general tendency to publish positive results in English [36], resulting in a selection bias.…”

Renal Biopsy Research in the Former Soviet Union: Prevention of a Negligent Custom

“…Methods of glomerular morphometry, used earlier in [4, 10, 28, 29] and criticized in [11], as well as similar ones, were applied by other scientists [26, 27] without references. Furthermore, research already performed abroad was occasionally repeated in some form in the SU because of the partial isolation from the international scientific community and insufficient availability of foreign professional literature [30, 31]. …”

“…Resulting publications contributed to dissemination of modern scientific knowledge. It should be noted that even in such cases the principle of priority was sometimes violated if results published by foreign authors were directly or indirectly presented as own achievements [31, 32]. Along with publications having value of review with testing and adaptation of foreign results to domestic conditions, numerous useless and partly fabricated reports were published.…”