davidrothman.net

Usually I try not to repeat items already covered by another MedLib blogger, and Michelle Kraft posted about it before I did, but this is different for me because Dissect Medicine is the second attempt I’ve seen at applying the model of Digg.com to Medical Literature (the first I saw and posted about was BioWizard).

Like BioWizard’s PubMed Wizard, Dissect Medicine is a site where users rate articles, but the two are quite different in a number of ways.

Articles Reviewed

• Dissect Medicine: Any article submitted by a user
• BioWizard: Any article indexed in PubMed

User Input

• Dissect Medicine: User can comment as much as desired, email the article to a colleague, and either vote for a story’s promotion or ignore it.
• BioWizard: User can comment as much as desired, email the article to a colleague, rate an article on a scale of 1 to 12, save the abstract to user’s favorites, share the abstract with another BioWizard user, or view abstracts judged similar by PubMed.

Organization

• Dissect Medicine: Organized by categories (clinical trials, complementary medicine, diseases and conditions, drugs and theraputics, fertility pregnancy and parenting, fitness and exercise, food and nutrition, healthcare management, industry news, medical education and employment, medical ethics and law, medical research, offbeat medical news, public health and policy, regulatory information, technology and devices).
• BioWizard: Search articles as one would in PubMed or browse top-rated articles. On Advanced Search tab, user can search by MeSH.

RSS

• Dissect Medicine: Has feeds.
• BioWizard: Doesn’t have feeds.

Summary
BioWizard’s heavy use of the NCBI Entrez API makes its focus professional medical literature, and deeply enriches the content of the site. I’m seeing BioWizard as an alternate interface to PubMed with social features added.

Since Dissect Medicine’s articles are submitted by users, its focus seems to be now on publicly (freely) available literature, which makes its focus more on consumer literature.

What I’d really like to see is a resource that can handle both all articles indexed in PubMed AND articles submitted by users.

As noted in my brief review of BioWizard, I also think a lot of value could be added by defining a group of users (members of a practice, a class, a hospital, a professional association) that could sort the scoring and rating of articles either by the aggregate scores for the entire user base OR just see the articles as rated by members of their own group.

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August 22nd, 2006 | Category: Technology | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed