The Metatextbook of Medicine is grown up from the idea to write Wikipedia articles. Sometimes, I reasoned that it is a hard task to write one or ten and to defend them against the peers, especially in Germany where I reside. And I recognized that one could write one or ten articles but they wont compare with the vast amount of review and original work around, the own dont, and those others -. So, I decided to create not the wikipedia contents but references only, but only those papers, which could be accessed freely with a few clicks.

Try to see it as you use wikipedia as a customer seeking knowledge; choose a concept and see what people wrote about it.

In this way, I created 7000+ entries (like "interleukin 6" or "glomerulonephritis"), each opening a bibliography of review articles. I scanned the PubMed titles of those review articles marked "free full text" and those from journals which are freely accessible beyond what pubmed is allowed to know. Criteria of inclusion are "doesnt sound like trash" and "could be of importance to a reader with interest in that topic" (my personal interest in at least 2/3 of the 7000 entries is zero ... ). Selected papers to be cited are not read by me to (de-)select them, on the one hands side, i think i will have 100.000 therein at 06/2012, on the others, the project is (pseudo)commercial ("funded" by google ads, promoted by diverse efforts to get it known hence by fiscal agency) and i would not look very happy if i had to pay commercial copyright fees only to deselect papers. Maybe, i should implement an individual article voting system, which should enable the community to improve performance.

The developmental timescale is that i have quite a little bulk of references inside - and countless in the pipe of indexing, so the ressource will be ready to market at 06/2012 with appropriate contents.

The current version has some little bugs, but it can be used as i wanted it to work currently. You can 1.) select manually a concept 2.) search for a concept (like wikipedia) and 3.) open a book chapter to find a concept as ordered into a book page of contents, currently usable is the "pulmology" version. Contents is up-to-2009 currently, and as told above, in the second run searches i had done, i have really a big collection of papers to include.

The current advice: Try it today, keep it in mind, its growing and the idea behind is a smart one. I think it will be O.K. somewhat around summer 2012.