Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

The National Library of Medicine has a lot of related resources with similar names, and it’s easy to get them confused. To make matters worse some also look similar, like PubMed and PubMed Central. Others you might hear about but not really see, like MEDLINE (not to be confused with MedlinePlus, NLM’s consumer health website).

So what are they? MEDLINE is a database of citations and abstracts to biomedical literature, chosen by an expert committee and including articles in over 5,000 journals. It’s basically there to tell us what’s out there in the biomedical field, and to help us locate it.

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Have you ever wondered what kinds of toxins or hazards you or a loved one may be exposed to at work?  If you are concerned with health hazards in the workplace, Haz-Map  is a resource for you to consider. Haz-Map, provided by the National Library of Medicine’s Information Services Division, contains information about potential occupational health hazards. The system allows its contents to be searched and browsed in a number of ways. From the home page, you can search or browse by ‘agent’, ‘disease’ or ‘job’. These options help its users to navigate it easily without much difficulty.  Available information includes disease types, common adverse effects from these diseases, and symptoms. You can simply select a job type, and it will give you a list of related diseases associated with that field.  With information applicable to both the general public and researchers and clinicians, you don’t need to be a research specialist to navigate this site, so give it a try!

<submitted by David Guerra>

If you’re looking for evidence-based research on clinical effectiveness, there’s a new resource for you: PubMed Health is a free service from the National Library of Medicine that provides access to clinical effectiveness research. This type of research, which includes clinical trials and systematic reviews, focuses on proving whether a given treatment or test really works. Knowing both the possible benefits and harms of an intervention can help clinicians and patients make better choices, and PubMed Health helps provide the evidence that’s needed to make these decisions.

PubMed Health provides a wide variety of information for both health professionals and patients. Information for clinicians is drawn from a number of sources, including the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the Cochrane Collaborative, and several other national and international partners. Most of the information is designed to provide quick answers to clinical questions, taking the form of reviews, clinical guides, and executive summaries, although full text reviews are also available. 

Patients can also access reliable, evidence-based recommendations and information via PubMed Health. The “For Consumers” section contains thousands of brief, easy-to-read summaries of clinical research. The “Behind the Headlines” section reveals the facts behind the sometimes-sensationalized stories that appear in the popular media, like a recent report that sitting will make your bottom fat (according to PubMed Health, further research is needed before this conclusion can be drawn). A Medical Encyclopedia is also available for patients who want to learn more about a condition or a drug.

PubMed Health doesn’t replace PubMed for health professionals or MedlinePlus for patients, but it does provide quick access to information that is focused around questions of clinical effectiveness. Don’t forget that PubMed’s Clinical Queries tool also makes it easy to search for clinical studies and systematic reviews.

<submitted by Lisa Federer>

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on PubMed search techniques. Previous posts have gone over basic and advanced searching and using MeSH to search PubMed. This post is about the saved search and filter features available through My NCBI accounts. Future posts will discuss subsets and clinical queries, as well as saving citations to your My NCBI account and exporting them to EndNote.

My NCBI accounts are free, and they work with PubMed and several other databases from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). In PubMed, they can be used to save searches, filter searches, and save citations, among other things.

You can create a My NCBI account by clicking on the My NCBI at the upper right hand corner of the screen in the blue bar on PubMed.

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This is the third in a series of blog posts on PubMed search techniques. Previous posts have gone over what happens with a basic search and using the advanced search and limits options. This post is about search using MeSH. Future posts will discuss other options, such as searching subsets and the features offered through MyNCBI accounts, such as filters.

In the previous PubMed entries, you may have noticed the term MeSH getting thrown around a lot. MeSH is an abbreviation of Medical Subject Headings. MeSH is a set of terms used by experts to index items on the same subjects by standard terms so that you don’t miss anything on a subject because you searched for one term when some authors were using a synonym (for example, heart attack instead of myocardial infarction). On the other hand, in order to use these subject headings, you have to be able to find the right word. Fortunately, as discussed in the article on basic searching, PubMed is really good at finding MeSH terms for you. But in some cases, you’ll want to search MeSH yourself.

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This is the second in a series of posts on techniques for searching PubMed. In the first post we discussed what happens when you do a basic search of PubMed. This post is about the advanced search and limits options, and future posts will get into other options, such as searching MeSH, subsets, and filters.

The fields mentioned in the last PubMed post (MeSH terms, all fields, and author) aren’t the only field searching options. There are many others you can search, and there’s no need to memorize them—they’re all in the search builder, which you can find by clicking on advanced search under the search bar. If you want to make your search more specific, advanced search is one place to start.

Advanced Search:

Advanced search allows you to build a more detailed, specific search by letting you choose which fields to search for each term you enter, such as date, MeSH major topic, MeSH subheading, MeSH term (I’ll explain MeSH in the next post), author, investigator, grant number, publication type, and publisher, among many other things. To use advanced search, first select a field, then add a term into the search builder bar, choose and, or, or not, and click Add to search box. You can keep adding things to the search box in the same way.

Note that there are several different date fields for searching; make sure you choose the right one. It will ask you to specify a range of dates. Enter dates as year/month/day (e.g. 2007/07/30); month and day are not required.

If you’ve performed a search that, in hindsight, you think would be an awesome search if it only had a couple more things added on, don’t worry! PubMed will save your searches for up to 8 hours; they’re listed underneath the search builder in advanced search. You can add one to the search box by either clicking on a number or typing it manually into the search box with # (e.g. #3) and keep adding to it. If you really like a search, you can also save it to your MyNCBI account.

Limits:

If you’re getting too many results, or if all the results you’re getting are in the wrong language, are all clinical trials when you need reviews, or are otherwise not the type of article you’re looking for, you can go to the limits page and set limits to get only the kind of articles you want. The link to limits is right next to advanced search.

Limits also includes date limits, age groups, and journal subsets for specific areas (such as nursing, dentistry, etc). It’s a good place to look around on your own to get exactly what you want. The only thing we don’t recommend is selecting links to full text or links to free full text under the Text Options box, because they do not check for availability at UCLA, so they may skip articles UCLA does have.

PubMed keeps your limits on until you turn them off. If you’re having trouble with your searching or are using a shared  computer, check for the Limits Activated warning under the search bar.

<submitted by Vicki Burchfield>