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Dragonfly
Winter 2002 -- Volume 33, Number 1 |
Our problem: How to teach effective use of PubMed?
Our strategy: Use interesting examples to illustrate the mechanics of how the system searches for material and displays the results.
Creating original examples that are both instructive as well as interesting is often the most difficult part of preparing for a class on PubMed.
As the teacher, you can take advantage of putting the cart in front of the horse: Find an interesting article, and to then tailor a search strategy to find that citation.
One of the best ways to do this is to keep an eye on national Internet news sites (such as CNN and MSNBC, which often rely on AP and Reuters sources) for stories announcing medical breakthroughs or scientific discoveries.
For example, scanning the Web on the morning of January 11, 2002, provided the following headlines that suggested possible PubMed search examples:
Protein Controls Severe Pain
Low-salt, Low-meat Diet can Prevent Kidney Stones
Both of these news items discuss the imminent publication of research in a major journal. These news items provide you with the name of the researchers and the journals in which their respective works will be published. Using this information, I could construct citation-oriented searches on penninger j [au] AND cell [ta] to retrieve the Protein-Pain article and borghi l [au] AND n engl j med [ta] to retrieve the Salt-Meat-Kidney Stone article.
Care must be used if you use this type of citation-focused search. The timing of the news announcement quite often precedes the acquisition and inclusion of the original article within PubMed. Check to be sure that the article is actually in PubMed before you do the search before an audience. Nothing is more embarrassing than to sell an audience on a search strategy only to have it pull up no hits. On the morning of January 11, 2002, neither of the searches listed above retrieved the desired citations. If you are patient, you�ll find within a few days that these citations have been added to PubMed. At this point they are fair game for serving as a search example, so long as you do not try to retrieve them using any of the fields that are only available after the record has been fully indexed.
Health-related Internet news stories do much more than simply herald the publication of new research. Recent events will often cause news sources to revisit issues that have been the subject of previous research. This type of article often leads to a controversial or surprising topic that is quite suitable to serve as the subject of an effective PubMed search example.
CDC Renews Sprout Warning
The article reaffirms the risk of developing food poisoning from eating uncooked alfalfa and bean sprouts. This easily translates to the simple query food poisoning AND sprouts and retrieves 25 hits. Taking the example one step further, you can substitute sprout* for sprouts to demonstrate how truncation picks up six additional records when compared to the original search.
Experts Debate Accutane Link to Suicide
On January 5th, 2002, a small plane was flown into a Tampa, FL, high-rise. The 15-year-old pilot was taking the drug Accutane to treat his acne. There have been questions in the past about a possible association between the use of Accutane and suicidal behavior. This story can be translated using the MeSH browser. The resulting PubMed search strategy of Isotretinoin/adverse effects[MESH] AND suicide[MESH] would retrieve a total of 11 hits.
Today�s medical and scientific breakthroughs serve as the inspiration for future research. Each day provides a fresh supply of potential examples for the database instructor. The four examples above were derived from a single morning of skimming the newswires. If you use current news items to serve as the subjects for your search examples, you�ll have no trouble capturing and holding the attention of your audience at your next presentation.
Dragonfly, Winter, 2002 --
Vol.33, Number 1
(posted on PNRNews January 25, 2002)
This publication is funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. N01-LM-1-3516.
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NN/LM | UW HSL | NN/LM PNR | Contact us: nnlm@u.washington.edu | Revised: January 18, 2002