University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center
The Latin American Social Medicine (LASM) database provides Spanish, Portuguese, and English structured abstracts summarizing classic and contemporary works in the field of practice of LASM. The abstracts are available on this website. The LASM database provides important information about the social, economic, and cultural determinants of health, and the organized responses to confront the problems. Originally this information circulated mostly within professional networks and other health and community workers located in Latin America. Through this website we expect to enhance the access to this information within Latin America and other regions worldwide. By May 2006, the database contains abstracts for 25 landmark books, 50 book chapters, and 100 journal articles from the classic social medicine. It also contains almost 200 abstracts from twelve current journals.
Phase I of the project was funded by the National Library of Medicine of the U. S. National Institutes of Health (Grant # 1 G08 LM06688 01A1) through the Health Sciences Center of the University of New Mexico (HSC-UNM) in the United States from February 2000 through January 2004.
Phase II of the project started in October 2005 as a collaborative project between the University Health Sciences Center (Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud - CUCS) of the University of Guadalajara (Universidad de Guadalajara) (Mexico) and the HSC-UNM (USA). In this phase a team continues selecting books, book chapters, and articles published in journals that include the Latin American Social Medicine materials. The database will be increased by 50 structured abstracts in the three languages each year. The team from Guadalajara is responsible for selecting, writing, and posting the abstracts to the date base. The team from New Mexico participates in training the Guadalajara team, collaborating with quality control, administrating the website, and abstract publishing. Both teams collaborate in design and evaluation for the new phase of the project.
Phase II is partially funded by the United States Department of Education, Title VI through a research program “Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access” (TICFIA), managed by the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) of the University of New Mexico (Grant # P337A050005) that will end in September 2009. Also, the Mexican team received support from the PAHO Mexico during the first months of the second phase, and both teams have financial and logistic support from the University Health Sciences Center of the University of Guadalajara and the HSC-UNM.
Social medicine in Latin America has become a widely respected and influential field of research, teaching, and clinical practice, yet its accomplishments remain little known in the English-speaking world. Important publications have not been translated from Spanish and Portuguese into English. The field's development also suffers from technical difficulties of publication and distribution within Latin America.
This project's overall objective is to develop and implement an Internet-based information system to maximize access to Latin American social medicine literature and to facilitate continuing publication and distribution efforts in this important field. We have constructed the system to target English-speaking investigators, educators, clinical practitioners, public health professionals, historians, social scientists, specialists in Latin American studies, and professionals in library and information science.
As articles and books are obtained from Latin American publishers, a structured abstract will be created for each source. After extensive quality checks, the translated abstracts will be entered into a database at the Health Science Center Library and on the UNM Web page. Links to and from institutions outside UNM will be created.
This project devotes attention in particular to the following themes in Latin American social medicine, which are emphases of the National Institutes of Health. Information in these thematic areas will prove useful for key investigators of health issues in the United States: social, environmental, and nutritional causes of infant and perinatal mortality (NICHHD); economic development, demographic change, and aging (NIA); socioeconomic barriers to cancer prevention (NCI); determinants of mental illness in race or ethnic background, social class, gender, and social violence (NIMH); and policy research on managed care, primary care innovations, and preventive services (AHCPR).
The information system will reach a broad group of users by identifying core and seminal works in Latin American social medicine, by creating and translating structured abstracts in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and by making them available through the application of Internet technologies. In addition, the Internet mechanism will implement an ongoing, on-line access system for publishing and distributing structured abstracts and articles of key journals in Latin American social medicine.