Developing Your Product Design Specification - Medical Device Design: Innovation from Concept to Market - page 92

papers (often 9- 0 pages in length) housed in specialist magazines called journals . The
papers are peer reviewed (this means someone else has checked the content and agrees it
is correct) and they should be number one on your list, well above web-based documents.
Your particular device will fit within a clinical discipline so identify the discipline and the
journal(s) that go with it (the focus group will help here). Now your links with the university
libraries will bring forth fruit as they will most likely have copies of the journals. If not you
can use one of the many scientific search engines to find the paper and procure it. Some
valuable search engines that you have access to are:
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.co.uk/
PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
Science Direct: http://www.sciencedirect.com/
Some papers are free to access, some you will have to buy; all have abstracts (or summaries)
that are free to examine. Eventually, you will isolate the journals you are always interested in
and it is possible to receive emails of the contents when published.
Reviewing the scientific literature is the basis of your literature review. The papers you deem
to be important to the PDS should be kept intact and summarized in the review. This review
needs to be a brief report that the PDS can refer back to; again, to make life for those who
follow easier.
I keep refering to “those who follow.” What do I mean by this? It is important to remember
two things. Firstly, you may not be doing the actual design, you may only be producing the
PDS, hence the designer that follows should not need to keep coming back to you to ask
questions about sources of information. Secondly, and this is rather bleak, you could have
an accident and expire. In this case there is no one to ask; hence a fully documented PDS is
absolutely essential. You may not expire, you may just leave the company; to the designer
following on it's the same thing.
Another important aspect of journals is the concept of citing. Every paper will have a list
of references at the back; these are publications the authors think are worthy to refer to. If
they are worthy of being read by the authors are they not worthy of you too? This is called a
citation review . Effectively you find the most modern paper you think is important and work
back in time. Soon you begin to find the common books, papers, and publications that people
refer to; these are often the best sources to find out about core issues. Modern web resources
(such as Google Scholar) do this for you.
5.4.4.3 Books
Libraries are the natural home of topics: textbooks, reference topics, encyclopedias, and
historical texts. Although we are in the Internet age we still need to refer to bona fide sources.
While the text on the web remains unregulated we cannot rely on content. Books are still a