How do I find a full text article? Part 1: Medline

Where do I find articles? In 1959, Librarian Herman H. Henkle's print journal collection, might have been your source! But in 2009, you have more options.

There are still a few print journals left on the shelves at Montgomery Hospital's Library, but most of your articles will come from three sources:


1. Medline is the largest database of article information. The National Library of Medicine(NLM) funded by the U.S. government, employs a large staff of librarians to summarize medical articles, and assign subject headings/tags to each one. The data is freely accessible, and many companies repackage it with different interfaces.

PubMed Medline: This interface is produced by the NLM, and is available from any computer for free. If you want free full text though, only 10% of the articles have a link to the full text online from the publisher. To restrict to full text articles, click the limits button, and choose the "links to free full text" option.

2. Interlibrary Loan NOTE due to closure of the library interlibrary loan is not available.

3. Google: Sometimes, if you are fortunate, a publisher will post an article in free full text to the web, perhaps because of the public health implications, or just because they feel like it.

Related Posts:

How do I find an article? Part 2: PMID Number

Explaining things with medical analogies

Altoona Hospital's Family Practice program has a list of medical analogies to help explain disease concepts to patients if they are having difficulty understanding. Analogies tell a kind of story, explaining a disease in terms of another subject that is more familiar, for instance comparing the risks of hypertension to pressure in a pipe, that often isn't noticed until the pipe bursts.
For other analogies check out http://www.scienceanalogies.info/webanalogylinks.html

Guide to Clinical Preventive Services

The Guide to Clinical Preventive Services was produced by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and includes guidelines and recommendations for preventive measures. If you need to know who to screen, at what age, for what disorder, this is the site for you.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) was convened by the Public Health Service to rigorously evaluate clinical research in order to assess the merits of preventive measures, including screening tests, counseling, immunizations, and preventive medications. USPSTF also provides pocket guides, email alerts and downloads for your mobil device.

Family Medicine Digital Resources Library

The Family Medicine Digital Resources Library contains user-posted conference presentations and handouts, and shared curricular materials such as PowerPoint lectures, learning modules, syllabi, digital images, video and audio recordings, recommended Web sites and more.

A service of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, there are expertly peer-reviewed materials on just about any topic having to do with family medicine.

Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses

Synopses are help you get answers fast. As Haynes says, "The perfect synopsis would provide exactly enough information to support a clinical action. . .for example 'Review: antibiotics do not lead to general improvement in upper respiratory tract infections.'" Any resource that provides an abstract of a single study, that answers a single clinical questions qualifies as a Synopses. Usually, though, questions are more complicated and require discussion of multiple studies, which I will discuss under Summaries.

ACP Journal Club, Essential Evidence Plus(formerly known as InfoPoems), and Bandolier may be sources of synopses that you have heard of, as well as PURL's from the Journal of Family Practice, and Clinical Queries in PubMed.

Related Post:
PURL's: Synopses from Journal of Family Practice
PubMed Quick Tip #3: Clinical Queries.

Related Posts:
Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies
Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses
Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries

Critically Appraised Topics(CATS): Questions for Journal Club

A useful tool for journal club, the Duke University Medical Library offers Word Templates for critically appraising topics. It takes you step by step through therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, harm, and systematic review.

Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses

In Part 1, I looked at the base of the literature Pyramid, the original Studies. The next level is Syntheses According to Haynes(2001), Syntheses are based on:

*Rigorous searches for evidence

*Explicit scientific reviews of the studies uncovered in the search

*Systematic assembly of the evidence to provide as clear a signal about the effects of a healthcare intervention as the evidence will allow.

Syntheses are more rapidly useable than the entire universe of Studies. Systematic Reviews are a particularly useful type of Synthesis, which set out to answer a single clinical questions.

• The Trip Database, is a filter for searching for Evidence Based Medicine(EBM), which conveniently breaks search results into categories, including Systematic Reviews.


• The Cochrane Collaboration is the most well known publisher of Systematic Reviews, a non-profit group that reviews evidence, based in England. Their website includes abstracts of reviews and plain language summaries.
  


• You can also search for the abstracts in PubMed, in the Clinical Queries section, under the Finding Systematic Reviews.

Related Posts:

Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies

Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses

Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries