Sleepy

I've managed to go through the materials for the introduction and week 1 of the class and am in process of submitting my first week's assignment. I have to do the second week, too--I'm behind, but I think that will have to wait for tomorrow morning when I do the laundry. It's an interesting class. I'm getting a new perspective on using MeSH (the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings) that will be helpful in my job. The class is also worth 5 hours of MLA (Medical Library Association) credit. :)

Not to bore the non-librarians out there

but as a medical librarian, I use PubMed a lot. Really a lot. PubMed is the free, government-based interface for searching MEDLINE and associated databases for articles in the health science literature. There are some major changes to how one searches PubMed coming up. Here's an excellent video showing how to use the new features to replicate what we do now. It is from the Mayo Clinic:


Thanks to David Rothman for including this video in a post.

Michelle Kraft also has an excellent summary post on her blog regarding the new changes. (She has a link to the above video presentation, but I didn't actually see the video until I read David's blog.)

Anyway, if you use PubMed either as a professional librarian, researcher, or just someone looking for health information, you might want to check out the video to learn more about the new Advanced Search on PubMed.

A new tool

Relemed, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine
Still in its infancy, it tells you how relevant (and ranks results that way) a citation is to your search in MEDLINE, but it doesn't tell you how many results or allow advanced searching yet. In the meantime, try HubMed. And, of course, if sorting by date is fine with you, there's the gold standard of PubMed.