Popularity growing rapidly as CMA Online turns 5
CMAJ 2000;162:858
Nothing says more about the growth taking place on CMA Online than the reams of data Ann Bolster brings to weekly meetings of online staff. The printouts, which indicate the pages receiving the most visits, are becoming very thick indeed.
Bolster, the CMA's associate director of new media, says the statistic she follows most closely details the number of individual "site visits." In January, that number passed 100 000 for the first time — just in time for CMA Online to mark its fifth anniversary at the end of this month. Meanwhile, page views are rapidly closing in on the 1-million-a-month mark, having reached 863 000 in January. "I can remember when we got excited after passing 50 000 page views a month," says Bolster, who adds that growth appears to be taking place in all areas of the site.
The number of searches made via CMA Online's MEDLINE literature searching service, OSLER, rose to 2175 in January, a 71% increase from December. The average search lasted 25 minutes.
The MD Management portion of the site, which accounts for about one-fifth of total visits and page views, experienced a 17% increase in site visits in January. Bolster says that number is bound to increase significantly because MD Management is offering more and more online services.
Dr. John Hoey, CMAJ's editor-in-chief, says the full impact of the Internet on medicine and medical research is only now becoming clear. "Electronic publication offers broad dissemination and speed as no other medium can," he wrote in a Feb. 22 editorial.
Meanwhile, CMA CEO Dr. Peter Vaughan says that Web-surfing mobile phones will soon automatically download the information doctors have preselected from handheld "choice boards." In a few years, Vaughan predicts, "information that now takes an hour to download will take 10 seconds."
At the current rate of change, says Vaughan, physicians will soon be "telling us what kind of articles they want to read, and we'll be sending them out automatically. By then, that device in your lab coat pocket will have the latest articles you wanted from eCMAJ, and much more."
Bolster, who has been in charge of CMA Online since its inception, agrees that change and increases in usage are now going to take place exponentially. "Just think about how far we've come in 5 years," she said, "and then project how far we will have moved in another 5." — Patrick Sullivan, CMAJ
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