The M@dnote project. Giving colour to Grey Literature in General Practice. A collaborative GPs knowledge network.

Abstract

“M@dNotes Project”. Giving colour to Grey Literature in General Practice. A collaborative GPs knowledge network. Sharing the results of research and scientific production is crucial for the survival of all disciplines. Health information is becoming uncertain and powerful economic interests disrupting medical information has triggered a loss of credibility. M@dNotes project (in Spanish NotasL@cas), is the by-product of non-profit collaborative international knowledge network of general practitioners, family physicians, and healthcare workers. One of the aims of this network is to discuss the validity of the information available on sensitive subjects and build a knowledge exchange network inside a community of practice. The project was born because we realized that more than 95% of the postgraduate and pregraduate research/reports/ scholar works (monographic works) to accomplish or finished one part of the training were finally lost and unpublished. Most of them come from interesting "minds" and are interesting topics to improve the applying of evidence in medical healthcare. From this perspective, M@dNotes is a unique local platform to rescue knowledge and support exchange and collaboration. Perhaps is isolated due to the circumstance of being restricted to few countries or a small group of practice. Nevertheless, we are trying to improve our qualifications in order to link M@dNotes to an open access network. It has been created to share different materials excluded from traditional academic publishing and commercial distribution channels: monographic, commented articles, files with references searches. These materials considered “grey literature” are the product of intense learning process and has been produced to achieve a qualification, be presented in a conference or were collected by users spontaneously through the web searches, with a knowledge purpose. Many of them qualified with an appropriate level because were submitted to a peer review or judged by a scientific committee to get an approval. The project includes an indexing method (Q Codes and ICPC) to manage and retrieve the materials received. Q-Codes are intended for indexing Family medicine related documentation jointly with the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC). The project provides a particular folder to upload and share the documents. A web blog is the dissemination tool or friendly interface to share and retrieve the documents shared in the network. Through a facility in the cloud, it is possible to access an excel file with all the materials shared, codes assigned and the hyperlink to get a pdf file of each material.