Getting from medical news stories to the Getting from medical news stories to the real research using PubMed and more real research using PubMed and more

Jenny Reiswig / UCSD Biomedical LibraryJenny Reiswig / UCSD Biomedical Library

Sunscreen will save your life!Sunscreen will kill you!Coffee will give you cancer!Coffee prevents cancer!

AAAAH!

Personal health interestsYour mom who thinks you know

everythingSettling bets with friends – PROFIT!

Where medical research comes fromWhat to look for in medical news

storiesWhere the research lives: PubMedGetting your hands on actual papers

I’m a librarian, not a doctor!Self-diagnosis can be dangerous &

scaryNormal isn’t interestingRisk != causality. You are not a

population, you are an individual living in your own unique soup of genetic & environmental factors.

CONFERENCES

Multi-day meetings, once a year for each society.

Big announcements Several related

announcements Main challenges: may

be impossible to get your hands on full text

Where to go: the society that hosted the conference.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Specific studies No “calendar” –

published continuously

Generally conclusions much less black & white than reports

Main challenges: pre-publication press releases, getting hands on full text

THOUSANDS of them General journals: JAMA, New England

Journal of Medicine Specialty clinical journals: Annals of

Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, Neurology

“Research” journals: Cell, Nature Medicine

Most journals online now, but still follow print paradigm: volumes, issues, pages. Most not free.

Articles usually 3-15 pages long with one or more authors

Standard format: Problem, Methods, Results, Conclusions.

Written by and for researchers. Not for consumers.

Pre mid-90s, very hard for consumers to find this information.

Name of the researcher/authorWhere they work Name of a journal “in today’s issue

of JAMA…”Some of the most technical words in

quotesLook for a citation or link on the

news article – usually not there, but sometimes you get lucky!

Remember doing lit searches in school?

PubMed is the lit search database for medicine.

FREE: your tax dollars at workMillions of citations to medical

journal articlesOnly small subset is available freeGood news: there’s a medical library

in town!

Be as specific as possibleUse medical jargon if you know itTabs are your friends: Limits,

History“PMC” is an all-free subset of journal

articles If you find one good article, use

“related articles” to find more like it“Citation” display format shows

controlled subject terms, good for finding correct jargon

Generally NOT free online to the public

Search the article title “as a phrase” in Google – author may have a manuscript on their own website

See if we have the journal at a San Diego library: search the journal title in roger.ucsd.edu, circuit.sdsu.edu

Write to the author for a reprint

scholar.google.com Good for areas beyond medicine –

engineering, general science medlineplus.gov

For basic background medical information, aimed at consumers

knol.google.com More in-depth than medlineplus, less in-

depth than PubMed. Watch for bias! drugs.com

Pill identifier tool

Thank you!

Jenny Reiswig jreiswig@ucsd.eduTwitter: bmljenny