The selection of high-impact health informatics literature: a comparison of results between the content expert and the expert searcher.

BACKGROUND The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health Information Technology (NRC) created the Health IT Bibliography that contains peer-reviewed articles in eleven different health informatics categories. To create the bibliography, informatics experts identified what they considered the seminal articles in each category. METHODS Using the same eleven categories, an expert searcher (librarian) compiled a list of the "best" health informatics articles using information seeking and retrieval tools. The two sets of articles were then compared using high citation counts as a measure of value. RESULTS The expert searcher set (8,230) contained more than 3 times the citations to chosen articles compared to the content expert set (2,382). Of 60 articles, 27% of those articles (n = 16) were included in both sets. The frequently cited journals were similar for both sets, and one-third of the same authors were cited in both sets. DISCUSSION While citation counts and the timeliness of the articles differed in the two sets, the same authors and same journals were frequently present in both sets. CONCLUSION A best practice for locating high-quality articles may be collaboration between expert searchers and content experts.