News from the Internet
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Ó Springer 2005
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News from the Internet
An Honest Day’s Research Researchers must declare conflicts of interest if clinical trial participants are to feel comfortable granting consent, according to the results of a web survey of 5500 individuals suffering from heart disease, breast cancer, or depression. The survey participants were all registered with the U.S. Harris Interactive Chronic Illness Panel (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/solutions/panels. asp#chronic), and almost two-thirds cited knowledge of the researchers’ financial conflicts of interest as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important in their granting consent. Those surveyed were asked a series of questions aimed at eliciting their opinions on whether clinical researchers should declare their drug company sponsorships and other financial arrangements. Almost all respondents (87%) said disclosure should form part of the informed consent process, although the majority said they would still take part in the trial regardless. Scott Kim of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI, USA) and his colleagues reported in the British Journal of Medical Ethicsthat they were surprised to find that almost half of the respondents said they were more inclined to participate in a clinical trial if they knew that ‘‘the drug company whose products is being studied is funding the study’’. Journal of Medical Ethics 30:73079 (2004)
Bioethics – Multilingual Thesaurus Tool for Literature Research Disposable in the Internet For the purpose of inquiring and key wording bioethical literature the DRZE Deutsches Referenzzentrum fu¨r Ethik in den Biowissenschaften (German Reference Centre for Ethics in Life Sciences) of the University Bonn issued, concertedly with national and international partners, a new multilingual thesaurus ‘Ethics in Life Sciences’.
The project – which started in 1999 – is intended to explore up-to-date developments of bioethics, particularly in an international context too, and to make the latter more easily accessible to specialists and laypersons. The thesaurus is a hierarchically structured directory of keywords with cross-references to related topics. If, e.g., someone is looking for literature on the topic ‘genetic engineering’, he will expeditiously come, via the thesaurus, across relevant partial sub areas. To this effect, the subject catalogue refers to a number of species such as ‘cloning’, ‘green genetic engineering’ or ‘genetically modified organism’. Under each keyword the user will find further thematic confinements and links to related topics so that the appropriate citation can easily be found.
Uniform Literature Exploration Furthermore, the thesaurus developed by DRZE and the cooperating partners in Go¨ttingen (IDEM), Tu¨bingen (IZEW), Paris (CDEI) and Washington (KIE) additionally serves the purpose of internationally uniform key wording of bioethics literature. The particularity of the ethics thesaurus is that it has been developed in three linguistic versions in a parallel layout, each with more than 2500 keywords. Consequently, bioethical literature
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