Consultation-liaison psychiatry literature database: 2003 Update and national lists

Every day there are 10,000 scientific articles published. Since the Consultation-Liaison ("C-L") psychiatrist may be asked to consult on a patient with any medical illness, e.g., severe acute espiratory syndrome (SARS), malaria, cancer, stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and a patient who may be on any medical drug, methods need to be developed to review the recent literature and have an awareness of key and essential current findings. At the same time, teachers need to develop a current listing of seminal papers for trainees and practitioners of this newest cross-over subspecialty of psychiatry-now called Psychosomatic Medicine. Experts selected because of their writings and acknowledged contributions to a specific clinical area or problem have examined thousands of citations to choose those articles, chapters, books, or letters that they regard as most important to Psychosomatic Medicine. In addition, psychiatric specialists in six countries have provided their national Psychosomatic Medicine (Consultation-Liaison) lists as examples of what they regard as the most important teaching materials from their national colleagues in their national journals: Australia, Brazil, Greece, Mexico, Portugal, and Taiwan. It is our belief that a cogent, international, systematic review will provide the greatest success in creating a "regionally-appropriate" teaching and consultation literature database with world-wide applicability. We review our current progress on this literature database and software, the technical system and data organization involved, the approach used to populate the literature system, and ongoing development plans to bring this system to the physician via mobile technologies.