Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Medical and Law Librarians Identifying and Correcting Uses of Law Databases in the Medical Literature

Objectives: The research team of one medical librarian and two law librarians explored the question “Are legal databases correctly used by medical researchers?”. The narrow coverage of literature within legal databases differs significantly from the wide scope of literature found in medical databases; therefore, medical researchers may not understand the limitations of legal databases. Both law librarians on the research team assisted medical faculty with medical-litigation papers with significant research limitations because legal databases lack a comprehensive list of case outcomes. This team hopes to provide guidance for medical and law librarians supporting medical-litigation research.

Methods: The research team focused on the use of LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two most common legal databases utilized in medical literature. The medical librarian conducted a search in PubMed for direct references to LexisNexis and Westlaw, retrieving over 600 articles. The research team screened articles to remove irrelevant references and then reviewed full-text articles to identify common uses of legal databases in medical literature. While examining the literature, both types of special librarians had to educate the other on research practices within their respective field. The medical librarian taught the law librarians about systematic review methodology and levels of evidence within medical literature. The law librarians explained how law databases are limited to literature such as appellate cases and state and federal statutes, while excluding litigation outcomes when cases are not appealed or settled out of court.

Results: The research team found that certain types of articles in PubMed, for example surveys of statutes, appropriately searched LexisNexis and Westlaw , while articles that focused on the legal outcome of medical malpractice suites inappropriately used law databases to make claims about case outcomes. For example, using systematic review methodology in legal databases can lead researchers to make incorrect assumptions about the legal landscape. Given the narrow coverage of literature in legal databases, if medical researchers approach those databases as having a similar scope to medical databases, they risk making inaccurate claims about the status of medical malpractice litigation outcomes.

Conclusions: Examining the use of legal databases in medical research required expertise from both medical and law librarians. Our role as special librarians siloes us to different parts of campus, but we learned there is a need to collaborate when supporting faculty conducting cross-discipline research, such as medical-litigation research. The team’s next steps include alerting medical librarians to the limitations of legal databases, so they can deter researchers from incorrectly making conclusions about the legal landscape of medical malpractice.