Toward increased quality consciousness for alcoholism literature

The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol Information (NCALI) is an information resource developed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It provides numerous information services to professionals in a wide spectrum of alcohol‐related disciplines and to the general public. These services are designed to aid in the identification and dissemination of literature in the alcoholism field. One such service is provision of a quality evaluation rating for the documents announced by the Clearinghouse. The Quality Evaluation of Literature System (QELS) is designed to select and discriminate among literature in the field on the basis of quality criteria developed by alcoholism field professionals and to announce the resulting comparative ratings to literature users. In this way, QELS aids literature users in determining those documents of highest potential value to them. QELS is by no means a censorship system. The Clearinghouse makes available a wide spectrum of alcoholrelated information, including items which do not qualify for the QELS program as well as both high and low rated information items. The mechanics of the system include initial document ratings by highly regarded professionals who are peers of the authors, the conversion of these “raw” ratings into standardized scores for comparability, the announcement of these scores through the many information services of the Clearinghouse, and the encouragement of user feedback ratings which are factored into the document scores on a regular review and update cycle. Evaluation of the techniques employed in the QELS program and of its overall effectiveness is being carried out on a continuing basis. The program holds promise for providing a valuable service to users in any disciplineor issue‐oriented information field.