5 Things to Say NO in Literature Monitoring

How many times have you caught yourself reading articles that, in the end, added little to no value to your work? You open PDF after PDF, carefully read abstracts, and then realise: this material doesn’t actually help assess drug safety. Literature monitoring in pharmacovigilance isn’t just about finding new signals – it’s also about filtering out noise and irrelevant sources.

Here are five things you should say “no” to, so your work becomes more effective and focused.

1. Say NO to Irrelevant Journals

Not everything published is worth your attention. Some journals have questionable reputations, while others do not focus on drug safety. Monitoring every available source can take hours, but it provides minimal benefit.

Official lists of journals recommended by regulatory authorities exist, but they are constrained – literally, you can count them on one hand. Keeping these lists updated and checking whether any journals have ceased publication can be exhausting, but it is essential for maintaining effective literature monitoring.

Tip: Regularly review your journal lists to ensure you focus on relevant, high-quality sources. With tools like DrugCard, you don’t need to check journal relevance manually – the platform ensures completeness and up-to-date coverage across all monitored countries.

2. Say NO to Old or Outdated Studies

Older studies may reflect practices and data that are no longer relevant. Using such materials can mislead your assessment and distract from important safety signals. Databases often retain older publications, making it easy to come across information that has lost its significance.

Tip: Set time filters and select only up-to-date publications. This helps you focus on current data and prevents wasted effort on material that does not reflect contemporary clinical practice. With DrugCard, setting these filters takes just a few clicks, automatically limiting results to your selected timeframe.

3. Say NO to Manual Monitoring

Manually tracking dozens of journals, new articles, and reports is not only exhausting but also highly inefficient. Sometimes, specialists spend hours manually marking relevant materials and filtering them, with minimal results. Moreover, manual literature monitoring increases the risk of overlooking important information.

Tip: Use automated approaches and tools that help pre-screen and filter out irrelevant materials.

4. Say NO to Signals Without Safety Relevance

Not every mention or association in the literature is valuable for safety assessment. A paper might be scientifically interesting but contain nothing new for pharmacovigilance. Spending hours on such material is a waste of time and resources.

Tip: Focus on publications that genuinely impact safety assessment or indicate potential risks. Learn to filter out articles that do not provide actionable data for decision-making in PV. Tools like DrugCard can automatically highlight relevant articles, ensuring you see only what truly matters for literature monitoring in pharmacovigilance.

5. Say NO to Overinterpretation

Not every signal or association in literature is meaningful. It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating weak data as real risks. Such hasty conclusions can lead to unnecessary alarm or even incorrect safety decisions.

Tip: Always check context, statistical significance, and potential confounders. Critical analysis is your best defence against errors in evaluating drug safety information from literature sources.

Conclusion for Literature Monitoring

Effective literature monitoring is the art of filtering the unnecessary and focusing on the essential. Learning to say “no” to irrelevant journals, outdated studies, manual tracking, non-safety-relevant signals, and overinterpretation allows you to save time and energy for what truly matters: identifying and assessing important drug safety information.

If you’ve already decided to say NO to inefficiency, say YES to more intelligent monitoring. Try DrugCard for two weeks and see how quickly you’ll realise: choosing automation was the right decision.