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Dragonfly, Fall 1998 PubMed Training Tips by Nancy Putnam, NN/LM NER (reprinted with permission from NN/LM NER's New England Sounding Line, Vol. 8, No. 2)

It's that time of year again. Students are coming back, vacations are over, and research is in full force. It's the perfect time to hold PubMed training classes for your staff, faculty, and students. Here is a handy tip sheet on points to cover.

Explain PubMed

• Authority: Created by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) located at NLM which is part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
• Compared to other free MEDLINE services, PubMed and IGM are more current because NLM is the owner of MEDLINE and they put citations into PubMed as soon as they receive them while others have to wait for them to be indexed, saved to disk, and shipped out. It is also the most complete, since others can choose to allow access to subsets of MEDLINE. PubMed always gives access to the entire database.

Explain MEDLINE.

• Index Medicus, International Index to Nursing Journals, Index to Dental Journals
• Coverage: medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system and preclinical sciences.
• Bibliographic Citations and author abstracts when available from over 4000 biomedical journals published in the US and 70 foreign countries.
• 9 million records dating from 1966 to present, updated weekly.

Homepage

• Show the URL and explain that this is the homepage that PubMed will always open to. It is also the basic search mode screen.
• Explain that all the features of PubMed can be located in the gray sidebar located on the left side of the screen.
• Explain uses of overview, help, new/noteworthy, and clinical alerts -- skip the middle section and show the links to NLM, NCBI, and NIH. You can explain that NIH has good consumer information so if a physician needed to refer a patient they may want to suggest NIH's homepage to use first rather than the more technical PubMed articles.

Basic Mode

• Search Term: Use at least two words, preferably at least one, two-word phrase and one term that will map to a different MeSH term. This will demonstrate both the phrase index feature as well as the mapping feature. Trainers often use Vitamin c common cold as terms because they exhibit all the desired features.
• Note: When discussing MeSH, explain that it is a controlled vocabulary or a set of terms by which each article is indexed. Tell them that using MeSH terms will give you a more precise search because you will not retrieve articles that only briefly mention the term as a keyword search would. Therefore if an article is about vitamin c, the indexed term or synonym would be ascorbic acid. End by mentioning that with PubMed, you don't have to know what the indexed words are because it will usually map to the appropriate MeSH term for you.
• Type your chosen phrase into the text box and click on search.

Results Screen

• Very Important Section: Take your time explaining it because it will save you time in the long run. Begin with the details button to demonstrate the way the phrase index and mapping worked. Tell them this is where the computer interprets your search, and it is a good place to go if you are not retrieving the results that you expected.
• Locate number of retrievals.
• Three ways to display articles:

• Three formats

• Demonstrate printing, saving, ordering (give them your LIBID to sign up for Loansome Doc if desired), going to the next page, how to change docs per page and why you would want to do so, explain entrez date vs. pub date. Show them the link back to the homepage in the titlebar and the help link.
• See related articles: Explain how this is great if you are not finding what you want, but that articles are arranged in relevancy order rather than reverse chronological order as all the others are and that the results are not modifiable.
• Demonstrate an author search and show them where they can locate the proper format if forgotten.

Advanced Mode

• Search Fields: Show in pull down menu and explain the usefulness of searching with fields. Using language as an example explain if you search English in all fields you may find articles written in a different language but that have the word English somewhere in the article.
• Search Terms: Begin with two terms that you can OR together that will yield a substantial number of hits. Then use the add terms to query to AND a term and continue to use this feature with different search fields to limit the query even more.
• Retrieving citations: same result screen as basic mode.
• List terms Mode: useful for unknown spellings.

MeSH Browser

• Assess participants: Are they still alert? Have they been asking thoughtful questions demonstrating an understanding of the system (show browser) or repetitive questions demonstrating discomfort with the material (skip browser)?
• Search term: Use a term that does not automatically map but gives a list of terms to choose from. Example: exertional asthma.
• Detailed display: explain subheadings and major topic heading, not too much detail about the trees and explosion.
• Remember: Once you leave the MeSH browser you can not go back during the current search.

Clinical Queries

• Explain filters and stress limited results not everything on a subject.
• Show table
• Define sensitivity and specificity
• Run a search (using the same search terms as in the basic mode demonstrates the difference in number of retrieval.)

Journal Browser

• Demonstrate how to find out if a journal is indexed in PubMed with or without the full title.
• Demonstrate how to find journal abbreviations from title words or find full titles from abbreviations.
• Demonstrate how to locate "table of contents" (most recently indexed articles) for a given journal.

Citation Matcher

• Fill in some of the blanks.

If you want to cover everything in this hand out, put aside about 2 hours of class time, or if you speak quickly, 1.5 hours. If you have only a limited time, one hour or less, decide whether you want to demonstrate the basic or advanced mode and then just stick with a detailed explanation of how to manipulate the results. Please contact your RML if you have any other questions about training users to search PubMed.

See also: NN/LM's Training Materials

URL: http://nnlm.gov/pnr/news/199810/putnam.html