Are you (seen as) the expert?

This came across my desk today from a vendor.  It is most directly relevant to those of us in the device world, but it also begs the question more broadly – are we seen internally in our companies as the experts in search? 

If so, then at the very least #0-6 below should be recognized as “our domain” – otherwise we risk ceding the expertise to others and losing that credibility.  Moreover, if we’re doing these items, not only are we reinforcing value and saving institutional money, but also building opportunities to show additional value in creating knowledge.

Dear Colleague,

March 2010 is rapidly approaching. Every medical device you sell in Europe will need a new or updated Clinical Evaluation Report on file with your Notified Body by that time.

These are not minor documents to write. Together with your writer you’ll need to do the following tasks:

[0] Identify purpose (hypothesis) of evaluation,

[1] Identify keywords,

[2] Identify data filters and cut-offs,

[3] Build Boolean search strings,

[4] Have access to and search Embase, Medline, Cochrane Library, and other databases,

[5] Identify articles to acquire,

[6] Acquire the full-text articles,

[7] Read and weight each article for relevance and data integrity,

[8] Exclude redundant or unusable articles,

[9] Analyze remaining articles,

[10] Write the report.

 …

Our team of experts can train you, teach you the depth and breadth that is expected in these reports, or write the reports for you.