It’s a great privilege to work with SLAIS students, and this past year was no exception. Dawn Bassett, Jeremiah Saunders, Andrea Freeman – the list of promise goes on. With respect to Andrea, we are presenting the following at this weekend’s CHLA/ABSC conference and also the UBC E-Learning Conference:
Current Awareness: Using RSS Feeds in Medicine – Andrea Freeman, Dean Giustini
1. PubMed.gov & Hubmed.org
– Info “pushed” to users via RSS feed as research is published.
2. Top Four (4) Medical Journals
Recent medical, clinical & research findings of importance.
– BMJ http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/misc/rss.shtml
– JAMA http://pubs.ama-assn.org/misc/rssfeed.dtl
– Lancet thelancet.com/account/alerts (no RSS feed yet)
– New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) http://content.nejm.org/rss/
3. BioMedCentral (BMC) – The Open Access Publisher
Peer-reviewed research journals across many areas of biology and medicine.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/rss/
4. Nature Publishing – Medicine
Subscribe to Nature’s many journals. Nature Podcast is a free weekly audio show.
http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/02_newsfeed.xml&style=xml/02_newsfeed.xsl
5. Science magazine
International weekly. Science news, commentary and research. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). http://www.sciencemag.org/rss
6. CBC News – Health & Science
Read current Canadian and international health and science news updates.
http://www.cbc.ca/rss/
7. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Latest news and events from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
http://www.nih.gov/news/
8. Medscape (WebMD)
Medscape headlines in 32 different specialities, or subscribe to all with one feed
http://www.medscape.com/pages/public/rss
9. National Library for Health (NLH)
Read headlines to find out what’s new at U.K. National Health Service (NHS).
http://www.library.nhs.uk/rss/
10. World Health Organization (WHO)
Latest news on disease outbreaks and other WHO headlines
http://www.who.int/about/licensing/rss/en/
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See Canadian health library RSS feed lists:
University of Manitoba Health Sciences http://www.umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/health/internet/RSS_feeds.shtml
University of Alberta Health Research feeds: http://www.epc.ualberta.ca/updates.html
The Scobleizer and the Krafty Librarian had the courage to talk about family members on their blogs today – I didn’t. I’m an information specialist, and feel bound by patient confidentiality. (Sure, Google health will be a welcome feature when it arrives on Wednesday, but I don’t care right now. I need a good doctor.)
What is the prognosis for my beloved family member who’s been diagnosed? As it happens, the doctor was a med student here at UBC hospital years ago. On the verge of writing her boards, she spent time explaining the diagnosis to me. I was grateful that my loved one was getting superb care here in Canada.
In my distress, I tried “the meaning of life“. For a time, I’ll be searching…
This news on Dr. Google and Google Health suggest that sporadic tests of the new health portal are underway. But don’t be fooled: this is not yet Google Medicine. This is a vortal to compete with the likes of Kosmix and HealthLine.
Once testing of Google Health is underway, I’ll explain why we still need a vortal for health professionals.
Peter Jacso takes aim at Google scholar after a scathing review of Windows Live Academic Search. In his presentation below, Peter cites a UBC professor’s paper comparing Google scholar favourably with Web of Science; conclusions get eviscerated as does the reporter from University Affairs for writing this. Here was my response – 1/2 way down.
Puppy love versus reality: the illiteracy, innumeracy, phantom hit counts and citation counts of Google Scholar for the UKSG Conference in Warwick April 2006.
Well, at least Google scholar blog escaped the WoP (Wrath of Peter).
One of the joys of online communication is making new friends, who send messages of support and encouragement – even news. This week, a young librarian colleague Eugene Barsky over at UBC Physio Info-Blog sent several items, and Jon Brassey from Trip Database blog sent these – for which thanks.
1. Peter Jacso’s review of Windows Live Academic Search – His verdict? “WLA is a deeply disappointing product”. Ouch – I’ll talk about his review on the May 6th podcast.
2. Google Health Probably Coming Next Week – a big announcement next Wednesday for Google’s annual press day. Hey, why wasn’t I invited? Just kidding.
Dr. Kevin Pho authors KevinMD.com, the fourth physician in our series of interviews. What distinguishes Kevins’ blog is his influence in primary care, how it shapes discourse between patients and caregivers and how that process helps lead to the best available information. The format of Kevin’s blog is clean, simple and compact, with links to the right that his audience can go to for additional information – including sponsors. (Some pediatricians want me to interview one of their own, which I will do – soon.)
I asked Dr. Pho questions about his use of information tools, his perspectives on blogging, and what he likes to read himself. 
1. Kevin, how do you search for information? PubMed? Google? Google Scholar?
Google is the major way I search for information. I use it to find patient information, print patient handouts, locate ICD-9 codes, as well as quickly obtain information from on-line medicine texts (i.e. eMedicine, Merck Manual etc.). I wrote a couple of articles about how I use Google throughout my day:
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2005/06/how-do-i-use-google.html
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2005/08/doctors-using-google-part-2-day-in-my.html
PubMed is better updated than Google Scholar – so I rely on that more to look for specific papers. I also used it during medical school and residency, so there is a familiarity factor with PubMed.
2. If Google went belly-up tomorrow – what would you find the second most helpful tool that you have access to?
I would probably use one of the other search engines. I particularly like Yahoo! Search and Ask.com. Of course, UptoDate will continue to be one of my primary sources.
3. How do you keep up in your specific areas of medicine? Do you know about RSS feeds, podcasting, e-alerts, and other “sharing” technologies like wikis, blikis, teaching portfolios? Do you think your colleagues are opening up to these technologies?
Blogging keeps me updated on the latest stories, issues, and studies. I generally spend about an hour a day browsing the news and blogs. Websites I use are the Google News aggregator, as well as feeds that I built on my blog (http://www.kevinmd.com/feeds). I also subscribe to the NEJM and Annals of Internal Medicine that I read online.
Also helpful is the “What’s new” section in new releases of UptoDate, as well as Journal Watch, published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. ACP’s Journal Club is a great quarterly resource of recent studies.
In general, the medical community is slow to adapt to technology. Many of my colleagues continue to receive their health information from paper journals delivered to their offices. There continues to be an indifference to medical blogging for instance. I think the “sharing” technologies/ Web 2.0 will eventually become mainstream – but it will be a slow process.
4. Do you have access to a good medical librarian? If you could ask them to teach you something, what would it be?
I work at a community hospital, so access to a medical librarian is significantly more limited as compared to an academic setting. I would ask a librarian to show me the optimal and most effective search queries I can use in Google and other search engines, as well as Pubmed and Google Scholar.
5. What are your favorite medical blogs?
I generally browse or read all the blogs on my feeds page (http://www.kevinmd.com/feeds). My favorites include Medpundit, Intueri, Clinical Cases and Images, NHS Blog Doctor, retired doc’s thoughts, Dr. Charles, and Medlogs.com (not a blog, but the medlog aggregator). Notes from Dr. RW has come out with interesting stuff lately.
I’ll do a weekly podcast – every Saturday. Next week, some discussion of Google scholar, Microsoft and others. In the meantime, enjoy what I think is the very first Canadian medical library podcast. Correct me if I’m wrong. “Have a look around”…
UBC faculty and students have expressed an interest in medical blogs – how to find them, where to search for blog content, and whether blog-info is worthwhile. Obviously, medical blogs supplement peer-reviewed content in journals – but blog use is growing, symbolic of a new collaborative spirit, and openness in medicine.
UBC faculty in medicine showed their interest in blogs by reading the top medical bloggers, like Stanford med student Graham Walker and Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Ves Dimov. Perhaps you have some interest in blogging now? Let’s hear next from a specialist – a nephrologist from New York City, Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, who writes KidneyNotes.com, whose ideas about medical searching are worth reading for their candour.
1. How important are tools like PubMed and Google Scholar to you and how often do you use them?
Dr. Joshua Schwimmer: Like many people on the internet, I use Google so many times daily that I hardly remember a time without it. But there was a moment almost ten years ago, when I first encountered Google Search, when I realized that searching the internet wasn’t necessarily a frustrating experience. At the time, I was using Altavista, an early search engine, which required scrolling through pages of irrelevant material to find anything useful. With Google, I found exactly what I wanted right away. It’s easy to take this for granted now, but at the time, searching was a very different experience.
Recently, I had a similar realization while using Google Scholar to search the medical literature. To put this in perspective, when I trained — and many people may have similar memories — searching the medical literature was difficult. It required trudging to the medical library, finding an open terminal, scrolling through a list of several hundred journal articles for ones that sounded promising, printing out and annotating the list, walking through stacks of hardbound journals until you found what you were looking for, bringing the pile of journals to a copying machine, copying them, then finally reading through a stack of articles. At the time, this all seemed like a natural and necessary part of the process. Now, most of it seems like a waste of time and effort.
Using Google Scholar is an entirely different experience. Search results are displayed in order of importance, which is based on how often they are cited and who they are cited by. Potentially, Google Scholar can instantly direct you to the most important papers in any field anywhere you can access the internet, and many of these papers are now available online. I use it at least several times weekly and sometimes daily.
Google Scholar is not a complete substitute for searching PubMed, because it isn’t updated as frequently. But Google Scholar is especially useful for rapidly assimilating the literature on a topic you know little about. Two recent experiences illustrate this. A seventy year old woman with neurofibromatosis came to me with severe hypertension. I was initially concerned that she had a pheochromocytoma, which is associated with neurofibromatosis. To look for other associations, I searched “hypertension” and “neurofibromatosis” in Google Scholar, which revealed that renal artery stenosis from vascular neurofibromas was also possible. We looked, and that’s what she had. Her blood pressure improved dramatically after an angioplasty of her renal artery.
A second patient was referred to me complaining that he had stopped sweating three months ago. I’d never seen anything like this before. So I searched Google Scholar, which quickly directed me to the literature on acquired idiopathic generalized anhydrosis, a rare neurologic disorder. I sent him to a neurologist for a skin biopsy, and this confirmed the diagnosis.
2. What do you find the most helpful tool that you have access to, beyond Web search engines?
For rapidly reviewing the latest ideas on many medical topics, I find UpToDate extremely useful. The articles strike an excellent balance between clinical practice and basic science. It’s not a substitute for reading the most recent literature on a topic, but it comes close, and it’s a useful place to start.
3. How do you keep up in your specific area of medicine (ie. nephrology)? Do you know about RSS feeds, podcasting, e-alerts, and other “sharing” technologies?
I try to keep current with the major journals in my field (JASN, AJKD, and others) and other general medical journals (NEJM, Annals of Internal Medicine, and others). Email alerts are helpful, because many articles are released online before they are published in print. I keep track of a number of PubMed searches of authors and topics I’m interested in using RSS feeds. I also read the UpToDate “What’s New” sections, which are useful summaries of new developments in many fields. I occasionally listen to medical podcasts, and I especially like the NEJM interviews and weekly audio summaries. I also use HDCN, a website which offers many audio files of recent nephrology lectures.
In my experience, physicians are becoming more familiar with these tools, and especially with UpToDate, but judging from the responses I’ve received at conferences, plenty of physicians still haven’t heard of newer technologies like Google Scholar. This is understandable, because many physicians aren’t familiar with computers. and learning to use some of these tools may require a significant time commitment. In the long run, most of these tools actually save time and make keeping current much easier.
4. Do you have access to a good medical librarian? If you could ask them to teach you something, what would it be?
While I have access to a number of medical libraries, I don’t visit them as often as I should, because I try to get as much work done online as possible. I’m sure there are many useful databases and other resources out there that I’m not aware of. If it doesn’t already exist, I’d particularly like to see a website designed by a medical librarian which allows users to simultaneously search Google Scholar (both all articles and recent articles), PubMed, Google News, and other medical and nonmedical databases and display links to the results.
5. What are your favorite medical blogs?
Clinical Cases and Images, by Ves Dimov, an internist, has excellent discussions about the use of new technologies in clinical practice.
Kevin, M.D., an internist, abstracts important medical news articles.
Intueri, by a psychiatry resident, has the best writing of any medical blog.
GruntDoc, an emergency physician, has fascinating clinical stories and commentary.
Blogborygmi, by Nicholas Genes, an emergency medicine resident, discusses medical training and other issues and is often insightful.
Medgadget discusses interesting new medical technologies.
These are only a few. There are many others.
Listen to my brief podcast before I post my interview with Kevin MD’s blog, and Dr. Joshua Schwimmer’s KidneyNotes.com. Creating an MP3 file using Odeo, and a simple $15 microphone, was easy as pie. Let me know how the sound file transmits over the miles. To start the podcast, click the arrow to the left of the slide ruler, below.
Postscript: Jon Brassey from Cardiff, Wales and Jane from the land “down under” (Australia) both say that my podcast came through fine.