sources of information in general physicians

Background and purpose: the rapidly increasing availability of information has coincided with fundamental change in the structure and delivery of care. this study is an attempt to determine sources of information which general physicians use. methods: with a cross-sectional study a 150 general physicians were selected by simple random sampling. a 20-item questionnaire was designed and distributed to collect data regarding the sources of information physicians used and the time they spent for getting relevant data. analysis was descriptive. the spss(version 12) software was used for data analysis. results: most participants (49/3%) were 25-34 years and 42/7% of them worked less than 5 years. of all participants, 44/7% studied less than 1 hour in day and 70.3% of them studied less than 2 paper in a month. the subjects most frequently deemed as most needed by physicians in an descending order were treatment (61.9%), diagnosis (55.6%), side effects (30.3%), prevention (29.2%). the most frequently used sources were textbooks (67/6%) and 36/2% of physicians said that cme seminars was not effective. conclusion: it seems that there is a serious need to encourage physician spend more time on more reliable sources of information.