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[via: http://liblog.mayo.edu/2009/10/13/video-tutorial-my-ncbi-custom-filters-and-sharing-collections/]

Melissa rules.

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I’ve been fretting about how my library’s patrons will react to the PubMed redesign, so I’m grateful for the revised tri-fold handouts from the NNLM- they’ll probably help ease a few concerns.

The new handouts are available in .doc and .pdf formats and include:

• Full Text and PubMed
• PubMed Basics
• PubMed My NCBI
• Searching PubMed with MeSH

[via The Cornflower]

If you’ve prepared any materials to help your patrons (or your staff) use the new PubMed and you’d like to share them with others, please let me know in the comments?

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In a recent comment, Creaky (Kathleen Crea) made me aware of LigerCat, a 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tool that is new to me. I’m really enjoying working with it.¹

I’m sure that more experienced Medical Libraryfolk don’t have to do this, but as I start putting together a lit search, I often start by going to the MeSH Browser http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html to begin working out what MeSH terms I might be working with. Alternately, I might go to Novo|Seek or GoPubMed with a few key words to get a frequency analysis of MeSH terms. In these examples, I’m doing some preliminary searching on Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.

LigerCat isn’t necessarily *better* at this, but its presentation is simpler. Rather than putting the frequency analysis of MeSH terms in a left sidebar, it gives a cloud of MeSH terms:

Seeing the biggest, most obvious tag item in the cloud (see above) is delightful. If one clicks on the tags in the MeSH cloud, they’re added to the search. When you’re done adding terms, you can click “Go to PubMed” to run the search there.

In this example, the query run in PubMed is:
(”encephalomyelitis, acute disseminated”[MeSH Terms] OR (”encephalomyelitis”[All Fields] AND “acute”[All Fields] AND “disseminated”[All Fields]) OR “acute disseminated encephalomyelitis”[All Fields] OR (”acute”[All Fields] AND “disseminated”[All Fields] AND “encephalomyelitis”[All Fields])) AND (”Encephalomyelitis, Acute Disseminated”[mh] AND “Humans”[mh] AND “Treatment Outcome”[mh])

…and the results aren’t bad.

If I was caught up in Google Reader (I’m not, and haven’t been for about 15 months), I would have noticed Creaky’s post on LigerCat a couple of days ago. This reminds me to move Kathleen’s feed into my “High Priorities” folder. You may want to do the same.

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Over at Up to the Waves, Lin shares her observations.

Lin also writes, however:

Pubget is only one of the 3rd party life science search engines that tries to create shortcut to search PubMed. If you are a serious researcher, my advise is using the 3rd party search engines with caution or as a pre-search. Getting comfortable and familiar using PubMed itself is your goal. If you need assistance using PubMed, contact your medical librarians.

I can’t wholly agree with this. Not all 3rd-Party PubMed/Medline tools are meant to replace PubMed, and some can simply do things that PubMed itself cannot. If you are a serious researcher, my advice is to make yourself aware of all the tools at your disposal, and use the best ones for the purpose at hand.

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The folks at Netbase have issued an apology:

Our first release of healthBase yesterday surfaced a few embarrassing and offensive bugs. These were far in the minority of results but enough to keep us up late improving the site. We sincerely regret and apologize in particular for any offense caused.

…I wasn’t offended. I just thought the tool was awful.

[/Update]

TechCrunch called healthBase “The Ultimate Medical Content Search Engine.”

I beg to differ. Rather than getting into what it is supposed to do, lets just try a few queries and see how its semantic technologies perform.

First, a search for causes of AIDS.

As a Red Sea Pedestrian myself, I’m fascinated to learn that Jews cause AIDS. Huh. What if I was a Jewish Physiotherapist? How would I live with myself?

Next, we’ll look at the “Pros & Cons of lithotripsy”:

Take a look at the “Pros” list. These are just partial phrases describing what lithotripsy is. This list of pros and cons make no sense at all.

Among the sources it searches:
- Wikipedia
- NaturalNews.com (Check out the embedded video in the right sidebar and listen to the lyrics- there’s some idiotic stuff there)

I’d recommend to healthBase that they dump these and instead search sites like MedlinePlus.

HealthBase isn’t even a good medical content search engine, much less the “ultimate”.

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If you prefer the interface, you can also try it from its Google start page.

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• Healia
• ClinicalTrials.gov
• A GoogleBase interface
• World Health Organization

Also useful for non-clinician is the MedlinePlus page on clinical trials.

Trial-X does a couple of things differently.

First is that it seems Trial-X can gather your demographic information and diagnosis from your Google Health account or your Microsoft HealthVault account and apply it to your clinical trial search.

Second is that the search criteria one can apply is far more detailed than in any of the other search tools I’ve seen.

Then it maps your information on a grid to see if you’re a good match for the trials known to the system:

And if there’s no good match? Trial-X will email you if it finds one.

I’ve only given it a quick once-over, but it looks pretty neat. Anyone else tried it? Any insights?

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What New Users Should Know
(How is Quertle® different?)

1. Find true relationships, not simple co-occurrences
On Quertle, if you search for two or more terms, you will find documents in which those terms occur in a conceptual relationship, not simply scattered within the same document. You won’t always find as many, but you weren’t really going to read 14,578 documents, were you?

2. Quertle understands biology and chemistry
Quertle understands the difference between “TWIST”, the helix-loop-helix transcription factor, and “twist”, the verb. So, use proper capitalization in your query, and you won’t be lost in a sea of irrelevant results.

3. Power Terms™ enable you to query for categories of objects
Use Power Terms™ to query for categories of objects, such as any protein or chemical (not simply the occurrence of the terms). See the Power Terms™ link under the query box for further instructions and the list of currently-supported Power Terms™. Use them; we’ll know what they mean. Want other Power Terms™? Let us know.

4. Useful help
Throughout the site, mouse over the (?) to see helpful hints. To answer many of your other questions, such as why there appear to be duplicate results, please read the Help and FAQ documents (links at the bottom of the page).

Things to look for on the Results page (check the (?) hints on that page):
a. More relevant results
b. Easy filtering and breadcrumb tracking
c. Key concepts automatically identified for you, including members of any Power Term™ categories used in your query

I definitely like the highlighting of search terms and the terms Quertle sees as synonymous:

I like the refinement tools to the right of search results:

It bothers me a bit that Quertle doesn’t actually identify who created or maintains it:

Who is behind Quertle?
Quertle has been created by biomedical scientists, chemists, and linguistic experts, who have many decades of experience with research and finding relevant information to support that research.

Since Quertle is essentially doing keyword searches, its power would be significantly improved if it supported Boolean operators.

Librarians, be sure to check out the Power Terms™. Currently-supported terms are listed here- what others would you like to see?

For more, see Quertle’s Help page.

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You can try it here.

According to the CSE’s main page:

Since many educational organizations and media outlets now host full-length content online, this custom search engine aims to make it easier to find quality educational content for students, faculty, and service providers in the health professions. Our goal is to quickly and efficiently locate videos, documentaries, podcasts, lectures, interactive flash content, and other educational media. Targeted topics include nursing, public health, medicine, physical therapy, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, epidemiology, medical lab sciences, communication sciences, psychology, etc.

Shawn also allowed me to post this list of the sites the CSE searches [XML] so you can see what sites his CSE searches. This allows you to not only build on or refine his work for your own purposes, but to suggest additional resources to Shawn (having checked that his CSE isn’t already searching ‘em).

If you like, you can add this CSE to your iGoogle.

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