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News from the NLM Technical Bulletin

Just some light reading for a muggy summer's afternoon

1. Linking Medline citations to evidence-based assessments and summaries.

If you're familiar with publications like ACP Journal Club or Evidence-Based Nursing, you'll be familiar with the sorts of articles in these journals: they are almost always descriptions of articles originally published in other journals; they are almost always about clinical trials of one sort or another; and, they all contain a section comprised of evaluative comments or analyses of the clinical trial being reported. Now, Medline will be linking the original articles to those evidence-based assessments. For the complete details on this, see the article from the Technical Bulletin at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj02/mj02_ebm.html.

2. Patient Education Handouts - a new publication type in PubMed.

Many publications indexed in PubMed have special columns or pages that are intended to be used as patient education handouts although each publication may have their own special name for such a column. Beginning in the 2002 indexing year, these will be identified with the publication type "Patient Education Handout" in PubMed. A quick look at the Limits in PubMed, however, and you'll see that it is not (yet) available there. If you'd like to see the documents that currently carry this publication type, go to the Preview/Index screen and from the "All Fields" drop-down menu, select "Publication Type" and then, in the adjacent box, type "patient education handout." Click on "and" to pop it into the search box at the top of the page, and then hit enter or click "go." If you do this, you'll see there aren't many such documents in PubMed - in fact on 6/27/02 as I write this, there are only 182. Why? Because it's new indexing. So, remember that you'll have to use other search strategies to find such items that were in PubMed prior to 2002. For complete information on this, see the article from the Technical Bulletin at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma02/ma02_new_pt.html