Preface
Conducting a thorough literature review is a major step in any research undertaking. This important step can become a frustrating process when a foray into the PubMed reveals disappointing hits. In Malaysia, where many research works are published in abstracts, reports and non-indexed journals, the search are often far from providing the relevant findings. This short-coming was the impetus for this initiative, and the collection of the “Bibliography of Primary Care Research in Malaysia” is now ready to share information on research works conducted in primary care.
This book is the culmination of a three-year effort – an onerous task through both electronic and manual search of journals (local and international, indexed and non-indexed), monographs, reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, abstracts, and books. This project was made possible by a generous funding from the Fundamental Research Grant (University of Malaya).
We wish to thank the Chief Librarians of the medical libraries at University of Malaya, National University Malaysia, University Science Malaysia, Institute of Medical Research, and National Institutes of Health for allowing access to their literature collections. We also wish to express our appreciations to the Heads of Departments of Community Medicine/Social Preventive Medicine/Family Medicine in these universities, Director of Family Health Development Division (Ministry of Health) and President of the Academy of Family Physician of Malaysia for access to their in-house collections of literature. We would like to acknowledge our research assistants who have helped in the manual search and data entry and especially to Matthew Cornelius Lee for his extraordinary IT skills and work. Lastly, we wish to thank all researchers who had contributed to this bibliography by sharing their research works with us and making this bibliography as complete as possible.
Ee-Ming Khoo
Cheong-Lieng Teng
Chirk-Jenn Ng
Safurah Jaafar