Department of Medicine

Keeping up

Course home Appraising information Keeping up Informatics principles Patients Searching Wiki help
log in with Proxy - ARS

Exercises

Features to look for

  • Content
    • Scope of domain
      • Broad: FirstWatch (sample email) covers all of health care
      • Medium: BMJUpdates (sample email) has numerous channels and also a quality filter
      • Narrow: MyNCBI & PubMed Informer (sample email) lets you set up a custom alert on very specific topics
      • Very narrow: HighWire and Elsevier are major publishers of journals. Through them you can set up a custom alert based on any word in the full text of the article in the journals they cover. Good if you have a very narrow clinical or research focus.
    • Delay between article publication and coverage.
  • Convenience
    • Media (print, email, Internet, audio)
    • Searchable online archive
    • CME
    • Online storage of favorites (this is not as important if you have another way to store articles online such as Connotea or RefWorks.

Journal web sites

(all have free email table of contents that can be accessed at home with the UTHSCSA Proxy Me bookmarklet)

Journal Aggregators - 'Synoptic journals'

 
Publisher Scope Delay CME* Comments
ACP Journal Club† American College of Physicians Internal Medicine 6 or more months   Overlap with Evidence-Based Medicine
BMJ Updates† BMJ Publishing Group Primary Care 1-2 months  

• Free
• Abstracts only without commentaries
• Can select many topics for your alerts
• Can save articles online

Evidence Based Medicine † BMJ Publishing Group Primary Care 6 or more months    
FirstWatch Massachusetts Medical Society Primary Care 1-3 days   • Free
InfoPoems InfoPoems Inc Primary Care 2-3 months    
Journal Watch Massachusetts Medical Society General and selected subspecialties 2-4 weeks Yes Multiple subscpecialty editions
 
         
New York Times? New York Times example None   Do this by setting up an alert to be emailed when articles contain the full name of a journal you are interested in, for example "New England Journal of Medicine", "Journal of the American Medical Association" , etc.
*Note that you can also pay to recieve CME credit if you use a personal subscription to UpToDate.
† These alerting services arise from McMaster Plus

SDIs (Selective Dissemination of Information)

Note: SDIs usually provide citations only without commentaries

Article management

Tips

  • Use 'RIS' format for importing/exporting between programs
  • Use 'Medline' / 'PubMed' format to import from PubMed to ISI, RefWorks
  • Consider tagging keywords since groups are not transferrable between commerical products
  • Use your UTHSCSA proxy for off campus access

Products

Product Vendor Storage of citations Cost Bookmarklet Word Processor Integration Comments
EndNote ISI Desktop/PDA $ Not applicable Yes PDA version is very clunky
Reference Manager ISI Desktop $ Not applicable Yes  
Procite ISI Desktop $ Not applicable Yes  
WriteNote ISI Online No UTHSCSA access      
 
Connotea Nature Online Free Yes Yes (with Office 2007) •  Not perfect yet; keep an eye on this one
•  A FireFox addon to integrate PubMed with Connotea or
•  Example of using a Greasemonkey script on FireFox to integrate PubMed with Connotea
MyNCBI NCBI Online Free     • MyNCBI is better at storing searches than articles.
• Offers no bibliography management.
Refworks RefWorks Online Institional access or $100/year

Yes

pmid & isbn

MS Word for Windows/Mac

• Can create multiple bibliographies.
• Can give users read/write or read only access.
• A bit slow and clunky.
• Must be on UTHSCSA computer or proxy

Zotero George Mason University Desktop Free Not applicable MS Word for Windows/Mac •  Not perfect yet; keep an eye on this one
•  Limited bibilography styles currently available
             

Futuristic, comprehensive knowledge management for the individual

  • CogniQ, but will it not develop as well because it is commercial and not open source?