gms | German Medical Science

In 1996 the European Union proclaimed the year of life long learning and the first conference was held in Dresden, Germany followed by the conference in Lisbon, Portugal, and two years later leading to the Prague Communiqué in 2001. This manifests that Europe is based on an information-based society and economy and lifelong learning strategies are important to face the challenges of Europe's future development. At the end of March 2010 a web-based search with the search string - "Life Long Learning"- was performed with three different search engines producing 6.600.000 hits in Altavista, 6.510.000 hits in Yahoo. Interestingly, a remarkably low hit rate of 944.000 in Google which is the most used search engine was achieved.

When using SCOPUS (Elsevier, Netherlands), one of the largest abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed literature, 848 hits between 1968 and 2009 covering the main areas of sciences including medicine, social sciences and business administration as well as engineering and natural sciences, were obtained. The number of publication is steadily increasing beginning in the mid 1990s obviously in conjunction with the European Union initiatives (Figure).

It is noteworthy that the first published article about life long learning deals with nursing education [1] in the USA, this was followed by more than 230 other publications in the field of medicine. Currently, the main effort is being made in the fields of engineering and medicine reflecting the high pressure of research and development with substantial personal and financial risks.