by Carl V Phillips
As some of you know, Clive Bates puts out a weekly somewhat-annotated list of PubMed-indexed articles that are related to low-risk tobacco products and/or tobacco harm reduction (the search string for that appears at the end of what follow). It is a great resource; if you do not receive it, I am sure he would be glad to add you to the distribution list. As part of a planned projected that I have alluded to before, I am working on how to reinterpret this as an annotated weekly suggested reading (or knowing-about) list. To that end, this week I was a “guest editor” for Clive’s distribution list, and I thought I should share what I wrote here to broaden the audience. Yes, it is a little weird to publish a one-off “weekly reading” that is mostly based on an existing format that you might not be familiar with. But you should be able to get the idea. Hopefully I will be producing one every week before too long.
In the meantime, here is what I wrote that went out via Clive’s distribution lists. Sorry for the weird formatting — it is an artifact of the way the original PubMed search was formatted. Yes, I could have fixed the for aesthetics to re-optimize for this blog’s formatting, but since they do not hinder comprehension, I am not going to bother — sorry.
Greetings everyone. Carl V Phillips here, doing Clive’s list this week. I am trying out a new format for it, as follows: (1) They are not listed in the order that popped from the PubMed search string, but rather is in order of how worth reading they are. Obviously this is my own rough blend of various considerations, including importance of what is being addressed, value of what was produced, how potentially influential it is, and how much reader effort it takes to get value from it (note that I put relatively little weight on the latter). I have left the serial numbers from the search on the entries in case anyone wants to recreate the usual ordering. I add a full-text link if I think there is anyone other than specialists in the particular area would want to look at the full text. (2) I am not limiting this to PubMed-indexed papers. I am including popular press and policy statements (and would have included blogs but there were not any apparent candidates this week).