Modern citations

When MEDLINE become free online, researchers now had a powerful tool with which to conduct research and keep up with the literature in their respective fields. PubMed from the National Library of Medicine is the most common tool used to search for citations. However, it is not the only tool available.

One alternative is HubMed. HubMed provides many features not found in PubMed. Searches can be saved as RSS feeds (updated daily) which can be opened in newsreaders. Besides the features found at PubMed, references can be viewed in TouchGraph, which provides a visual view of the relationships between articles. Another feature is TrackBack. With TrackBack users can leave comments about articles.

What happened to serendipidty? Those of us who use to trek to the library stacks often found other articles of interest in our quest for the article that we originally intended to find. One new tool which I think of as the electronic equivalent of serendipity is XplorMed. XplorMed is ideal when you don't know exactly what you want to find. XplorMed analyzes a set of MEDLINE abstracts derived from a MEDLINE search. The system finds associations between words in the abstracts. The user can then select a subset of abstracts based on selected groups of related words which can then be used to iterate further searches.

Lastly Arrowsmith is a tool which uses the citation literature to do research. Arrowsmith is a search engine that extends the power of a PubMed search. It takes two search results and compares them in a way that helps the user to see new relationships and assess the associations between concepts that may not have been previously known. Arrowsmith is based on the premise that information developed in one area of research can be of value in another without anyone being aware of the fact.

MEDLINE is usually considered only an intermediary step to the final destination which is a journal article. However, at the point of care, MEDLINE can be used as the primary source of information. If you don't know about a particular disease, say Erdheim-Chester disease, do a MEDLINE search. The list of citations provides a wealth of infomation just be looking at the title of the articles. Picking a few promising articles, the accompanying abstract usually gives further information about the disease in question.

Want to make your own book? Now that journals have published online for the last several years we can use those links to make our own books. We've all flipped through journal articles and found articles that we wished we had close by when we read films. Unfortunately, those articles get lost in our offices and are unavailable when we need them. Here's the simple method to put those articles where we need them. This requires a little work on your part. You have to use a html editor (like GoLive or Dreamweaver). Don't be alarmed, these editors are no harder to use than a word processor. By copying and pasting from the online journal we can construct a web page containing the articles that we want while we work. To see what I mean, check out the Thoracic Compendium my "book" of thoracic literature that I use in my work.