180 Cite your sources, please!

Newspapers running the New York Times Syndicate (Jan. 5, 2004) carried stories about how antidepressants affect the brain as compared to cognitive behavior therapy. The antidepressants reduce activity in the emotional center, and the therapy quiets the cortex, the area of higher thought.

I read it in the Wall Street Journal and made a few notes so I could look it up. I do prefer to read the original research of break through health information and if newspapers, consumer health magazines and websites were kind enough to actually site their sources, I could do that. But they don’t. This was a huge frustration when I was a librarian--people would bring in an article that cited “last month” or an acronym for a journal, or just “recent studies show.”

I went to the web first to see if the article were available on-line. My first time scanning the contents of January 2004 Archives of General Psychiatry, I missed the title (didn’t have a correct title to work from) and I hadn’t written down the authors names mentioned in the article. So I did a Google search and found the syndicate article from the Boston Globe and picked up two of the authors names and the clue that it was a Canadian study.

“[Helen] Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry and neurology who conducted the study while at the University of Toronto but recently moved to Emory University in Atlanta. . .Dr. Zindel Segal, a University of Toronto psychiatry professor who worked on the study. . .The study, published in this month's Archives of General Psychiatry, helps to contrast the two main approaches to fighting it.”

We should be able to just glance at the end of the article and find a two line citation, maybe in handy brackets to set it aside from the story. Instead, I have to scan the whole thing and try to glean clues.

Here is the citation. “Modulation of Cortical-Limbic Pathways in Major Depression; Treatment-Specific Effects of Cognitive Behavior Therapy” Kimberly Goldapple, MSc; Zindel Segal, PhD; Carol Garson, MA; Mark Lau, PhD; Peter Bieling, PhD; Sidney Kennedy, MD; Helen Mayberg, MD Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2004;61:34-41.

Similar item was posted at my LISNews Journal