Desempeño de estudiantes de odontología en el proceso de documentación científica en la internet.

Abstract

The scientific documentation on the Internet poses a challenge for researchers, since in this environment coexist different sources of scientific information with some variability in the quality of their publications. Students enrolled in the chair Introduction a la Investigacion of the career of Dentistry, University of Los Andes (ULA), are trained in strategies of scientific documentation for the production of a systematic review article and a poster. The present descriptive, cross-sectional study aims to describe the performance of Dentistry first-year students in the process of scientific documentation in the Internet. In a non-probabilistic, for convenience, sample of students a closed questionnaire was applied; it was self-administered online. The data processing and further descriptive analysis was performed with Microsoft Excel. It was found a high percentage of acceptance of specialized sources in health (66 %), but 34 % prefer to use Google Scholar. Among students, 97 % use descriptors (DeCS and MeSH) and 59 % identified the use of English as a limitation. Also, 69 % said that the main problem is the lack of subscriptions for full texts access. Currently, the ULA has no such subscriptions, and the exclusive use of open sources is not completely covering the information needs and objectives of the chair because potentially relevant units for the analysis are discarded. That situation affects this chair, the Faculty of Dentistry and the whole ULA, which nowadays is finding its role, established in the Venezuelan Universities Law, compromised. Results are expected to be useful to get the appropriate instances’ attention on the matter.