Background. The Internet-revolution of 1990s has greatly enhanced possibilities for the dissemination and use of scienfitic information. One of the most importatn steps on the way to making medical scientific knowledge available for scores of researchers was move to put NLM’s MEDLINE into free access in mid-1990s. The dawn of a new millenium has witnessed explosive growth of Russian Internet (known as RuNet). According to the survey of SpyLOG company in summer 2003 the RuNet has incluced more than 6.5 millon of frequent users, who read about 745 million Internet-pages per month. The question is still remains whether the young researchers are frequently use Internet and if so, whether they use bibliographical research tools like MEDLINE.
Materials and Methods. We have surveyed all first-year postgraduate students enrolled in Medical Academy for Postgraduate Studies PhD programs for two consecutive years (2002 and 2003). There were no serious differences between two years and we are reporting data for the group combined (n=71). Among surveyed there were 36 males and 35 females. Statistical analysis has been done with Stata 6.0. Results. Among males 16.7% (95%CI=0.06%-32.8%) has claimed not to use Internet and among females percentage was almost the same –22.9% (95%CI=10.4%-40.1%). Males vale used it no averange 9.5 times per month (SE=1.94) and females 4.5 times per month (SE=1.01), which means that males used it twice per week . This basically means that those students are part of what is definid as “core” of Internet users, logging to Internet at least once per week. We have also asked how many resources do they use and then a pair of experts has judged whether the resources they named are really resources for scientific work.Only 25 persons were judgedto have real understanding of scientific resources available in Internet (3.5.2%95€CI=24.2%-47.5%). Those who undestand the resources were able to name, on average, 1.9 sich resources (SE=0.23) The number of students indicating that they use MEDLINE was 15.4%(95%CI08.0%-26.0%) and of them 91% indicated that they are using NLM’s PubMed.
Conclusion. taking together those data show, that PhD syudents are frequently gaining access to the Internet, but theyr knoledge of resources for improving scientific research was meager. Only one-third of PhD students is capable of naming Internet resources for boosting scientific research. Only 1 in 7 PfD students used MEDLINE, though by having access to Internet they are capable of using it for free.
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