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P.Mean >>
Category >> Information searching (created
2005 -01-19).
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These pages describe efficient strategies for finding information in peer-reviewed journals or on the Internet. Also see Category: Publication bias and Category: Systematic overviews. Articles are arranged by date with the most recent entries at the top. You can find outside resources at the bottom of this page. Other entries about information searching can be found in the information searching page at the StATS website.
2008
[[There is no material yet from my new site.]]
All of the material above this paragraph is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by
Steve Simon and was last modified on
2010-04-11. The material
below this paragraph links to my
old website, StATS. Although I wrote all of the material
listed below, my ex-employer, Children's Mercy Hospital, has claimed copyright
ownership of this material. The brief excerpts shown here are included under
the fair use provisions of U.S. Copyright laws.
2008
Stats: Evidence Based Medicine for patients (April 23, 2008). There was an interesting email exchange on the email discussion group EVIDENCE-BASED-HEALTH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. The first correspondent (TH) described a series of workshops that are intended to help patients access and evaluate health related websites.
Stats: Searching through the Current Index to Statistics (February 15, 2007). I wanted to search for any recent references about teaching Bayesian statistics. The American Statistical Association has a nice resource for its members, the Current Index to Statistics (CIS). I ran a search for bayes%+teach% in the Keyword/Title field and found 61 references. Notice that CIS uses the % symbol as a wildcard rather than the * symbol.
Stats: Advice for searching in PubMed (February 11, 2007). Trish Greenhalgh wrote a nice article about searching for medical information using PubMed. Here's a summary of the wonderful suggestions that she makes.
Stats: Medline is a very busy place (November 6, 2006). According to a National Library of Medicine announcement, www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so06/so06_med_35.html, Medline, a database that indexes millions of publications from thousands of medical journals, is celebrating its 35th anniversary.
Stats: Searching for pediatric articles on Medline (October 26, 2006). A recent publication Age-Specific Search Strategies for Medline. Monika Kastner, Nancy L Wilczynski, Cindy Walker-Dilks, Kathleen Ann McKibbon, Brian Haynes. J Med Internet Res 2006 (Oct 25); 8(4):e25 examines search strategies for articles relevant to geriatric medicine, adult medicine, pediatric medicine, neonatal medicine, and obstetrics. For studies of pediatric medicine, the most sensitive search used the following terms: child:.mp. OR adolescent.mp. OR infan:.mp. which had a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 81%.
Stats: Searching high level sources first (May 17, 2006). When you have to perform a search for the evidence, it pays to look at high level sources first. A recent discussion on the Evidence Based Health mailing list produced a nice list of these resources.
Stats: Recent developments in searching for evidence (January 31, 2006). Dean Giustini publishes a web log, the UBC Google Scholar Blog, that covers recent developments and improvements in searching for evidence, weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/. While the title seems to limit the range of searching to the Google Scholar search engine (scholar.google.com/), the topics are actually quite varied and interesting.
Stats: Searching for information about the molasses with milk enema (October 15, 2005). I am part of an informal group at Children's Mercy Hospital that is trying to examine the process of Evidence Based Medicine to try to better understand it ourselves so that we can teach it and incorporate it into our practice. About a month ago, a question came up: In an otherwise healthy child with constipation what is the harm of giving a milk with molasses enema? I was just about to head out on a vacation, but I did a quick Google search and came up with some surprising references. But now that I have a bit more time, I thought it would be good to research the question carefully.
Stats: A third search for the evidence (August 2, 2005). Our evidence-based Medicine working group was asked to find evidence to answer the following question: In an otherwise healthy pediatric patient (> 1 month of age and < 5 years of age) which site (rectal, axillary, temporal) is most accurate in obtaining a core body temperature measurement? Here's the search strategy I used in PubMed.
Stats: Counterpoint on Google Scholar (July 19, 2005). A recently published article: Google Scholar: A source for clinicians? Henderson J. Cmaj 2005: 172(12); 1549-50 casts some doubt on the utility of Google Scholar as a resource for searching for medical information and describes some competing resources
Stats: Another search for evidence (June 7, 2005). Our new EBM discussion group is asking everyone to research the following question: In a patient (2 months – 2 years of age) with a fever > 38.5 (rectal) at what CRP level should empiric antibiotic therapy be initiated? This question was later clarified to In an otherwise healthy pediatric patient between the ages of 2 months and 2 years) with a fever of 38.5 rectal or greater, at what level of CRP should one be concerned with a bacterial infection. Here's one possible search strategy.
Stats: More on searching the literature (May 17, 2005). I was trying to track down an article that I remembered from several years ago. It was an evaluation of smoking cessation programs for pregnant mothers to try to improve the birth outcomes, especially an increase in birthweight. This query could easily be fit into the PICO format: Does the use of smoking cessation programs (I) in women who are pregnant (P) lead to an improvement in birthweight (O) compared to simply offering advice and encouragement about the importance of quitting smoking (C)?
Stats: Searching the literature (May 3, 2005). Next week, our hospital will have a seminar on Reiki. I thought it would be useful to see what evidence there was on this technique.
Stats: PubMed tags (April 28, 2005). Searching in PubMed can be tricky. If you don't find what you want the first time, it may help to specify exactly what part of the PubMed record you want to search for.
Stats: Searching the Internet (April 26, 2005). A response to a question on the stat-l discussion group provided a clever way of searching the Internet. Someone asked about finding references about how to analyze ordinal data. There were several good responses, but there was one that I liked best.
Stats: Language resources (March 22, 2005). Once in a while, I will get an email or find a website written in a foreign language. The best way to handle this is through BabelFish.
Stats: The Digital Object Identifier (January 19, 2005). Many journals are now using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to reference their publications. The DOI was developed as an open standards group, the International DOI Foundation, as a stable way to identify digital files that might move over time. If you know the DOI, you should always be able to find the file.
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by
Steve Simon and was last modified on
2010-04-11.