Bioethics on the Internet

The world of bioethics is at the intersection of regulation, societal values, and clinical practice. The Internet, with its ability to link individuals of varying technical aptitudes across disciplines and between organizations, is proving a useful tool for ethicists and those concerned with ethical issues in medicine. A review of sites for bioethics reveals continuing rapid change on the Internet. Those searching for bioethics information will have to use a new interface in 6 months. Many useful full-text documents are available, but since posting to the Internet is a recent phenomenon, the print versions of many documents must also be sought out.

Links to organizations

The Canadian Medical Association's Canadian Bioethics Report maintains an excellent, current listing, including university research centres, associations, patient groups, government agencies, and other organizations in the bioethics field.

Please note: As of 30 September 2001 the Canadian Medical Association's URL will change from www.mdm.ca to www.cma.ca. You should be able to find the resources mentioned through various navigation options on the CMA home page. Because of a site redesign, simply substituting "cma" in the specific URLs given in the article may not be effective.

Important sites

• Canadian Bioethics Society

• College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC

• Canadian hospital ethics committees

Full-text documents

Access to documents is enhanced if they are posted on the Internet, ideal for reaching the dispersed bioethics community. Significant documents include:

• CMA Code of Ethics

• Of Life and Death (1995 report of the Special Senate Committee on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide)

• Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans

• CMAJ series "Bioethics for clinicians"

However, some publications, such as those of the Special Advisory Committee on Ethical Issues in Health Care (BC Ministry of Health), are not available except in print. The BMJ continues to offer its complete content at www.bmj.com. The report in BMJ on the ethical dilemmas faced by University of Toronto medical students was available before newspapers reported this study.

The availability of bioethics journals reveals the state of electronic publishing via the Internet. The Journal of Medical Ethics is available complete, but only for a trial period ending 31 May 2001. The Milbank Quarterly provides links to abstracts but only the full text of featured articles. The Hastings Center Report is not available from the Hastings Center site. The Center is making the Report available to libraries in a package via organizations converting print into electronic format, with access available via the library--see, for example, the link for UBC faculty and students.

Finding more information

Bioethicsline (see Fact Sheet or online information), produced by the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature at the Kennedy Institute for Bioethics at Georgetown University, has been the standard source. Many citations are drawn from MEDLINE and augmented by indexers at the Kennedy Institute with specialized terms. These terms are drawn from a thesaurus available from the Institute's site. For a few years, Bioethicsline has been searchable via the Internet on Grateful Med. However, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) is making the logical step to distributed databases linked by one search interface. Rather than building a database with citations from MEDLINE combined with additional items, NLM has set up the Gateway to integrate search results from MEDLINE, LocatorPlus (the NLM book and audiovisuals catalogue), and other databases - for more, see the Bioethics page at NLM. Bioethicsline to the end of 2000 will continue to be searchable via the Internet on Grateful Med for the next few months. To do a complete search, however, an NLM Gateway search is already necessary if 2001 items are required.

A wider search using a general search engine--Google is becoming the most popular--will reveal the variety of viewpoints, some balanced and well informed, some with clear bias, on topics controversial and mundane. As well as organizations, Canadian Bioethics Report cited above includes information on recent court decisions and publications and upcoming meetings. Good directories of bioethics sites include bioethics.net and www.ethics.ubc.ca/resources. Perhaps the best international guide is from the producers of Bioethicsline--see the links from the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. A number of general directories include bioethics or ethics sections--see "Directory Sites" from the College Library's site. As well, additional links to bioethics sites may be found on the Library's site under "Bioethics" in the "Hot Links" section or under Bioethics 2001 section from "Learning Links".

Jim Henderson, Director
Medical Library Service
College of Physicians & Surgeons of BC