Today’s post based on the excellent material from the NLH Search 2.0 SHA Representatives group.

When to use them?

Whenever you need ready done quality synthesised reviews of the best available evidence.

The Content

• Bandolier - advice about particular treatments for health professionals and consumers based on primary and secondary research.
• Cochrane Library Database of Systematic Reviews - systematic reviews and protocols for future reviews.
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects - abstracts of systematic reviews published in places other than the Cochrane Library Database of Systematic Reviews.
• NHS Economic Evaluation Database - structured economic evaluations of health care interventions.
• Health Technology Assessment Database - focussing on prevention and rehabilitation, vaccines, pharmaceuticals and devices, medical and surgical procedures and the systems within which health is protected and maintained.

Searching Evidence Based Reviews

Check the Evidence Based Reviews check box in the search box at the top of the NLH page.

This will allow you to conduct a simple search across all of the evidence based review databases and materials.

As yesterday’s post suggested there are key linking phrases available to allow you to define the relationship between concepts in your search. As a reminder we’ve detailed them again below.

• AND - to make sure the words used appear in the results - this will limit your search results.
• OR - to create an either/or link to expand your search
• NOT - to exclude a word from a search (this will limit your search).
• EXACT PHRASE - by putting your search in “speech marks” you will search for the phrase as you type it. This technique also works with Google and other search engines and is a Fade top tip to find relevant material on the internet.

Searching indivdual or Multiple Evidence Based Reviews Whilst Ignoring Others

If you click on the Evidence Based Reviews Link (as illustrated below)

You will be taken to a specific Evidence Based Reviews Search where you can use the check boxes to select the resources as illustrated below. The usual range of linking terms are available to design your search to bring back optimum results (as detailed above).

Advanced searches can also be run using the same set of parameters as described yesterday.

Saving Search Results

To save results requires you to be logged into Athens (which you can get from the NHS here, providing you work for the NHS). Check the check boxes of the items you want to save and then click the button. Alternatively just click on Save Search Result for individual items.

To retrieve items you’ve saved when you’ve logged in with your Athens password jsut click on the Saved Search Results link in the MY SEARCH section of the page.

This is also where you can find Saved Search Histories, Saved Search Criteria and your Search Profiles.

E-Mailing Search Results

You can e-mail individual search results by clicking on the More Details link. This will then bring up an e-mail form (shown below) which you can mail to yourself or a colleague you think will be interested in the item. It has space for you to add your own message.

OK it’s 7 days to go to the implementation of Search 2.0 the new route to literature searching in the NHS from the National Library for Health. So we thought we dust off the guides from the NLH Search 2.0 SHA Representatives group (this post is from Resource Guide 1: Overview), adapt the guides where we felt we needed to and give you seven days worth of tip off of the goodness to come. Never fear though, if things aren’t as smooth as we hope, the Dialog databases haven’t gone anywhere for the moment (as for the red spot search logo we don’t know the reasons behind it either but any excuse to get in a few minutes practice for this year’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Clearly red is the new black!)

Searching the National Library for Health

Currently there are six elements (with a seventh in development) of the library that you can search:

1. Evidence based reviews - synthesising known evidence, these secondary sources e.g. the Cochrane Library should be used when you want a quality review of the best available evidence.
2. Guidance - if you are looking for international, national guidelines or care pathways, start here.
3. Specialist Libraries - offering rapid access to the latest quality evidence by patient group or type of service.
4. Books, Journals and Healthcare Databases (Bibliographic Databases) - use them when you need to search the literature (these will need an Athens password which you can get from the NHS here, providing you work for the service).
5. Images - quality medical images/photos/graphics.
6. For Patients - quality assured information for patients.
7. Drugs Resource - is under development… as soon as we can tell you about it, we will.

Searching the Resources

Easy Search

The search box appears at the top of the National Library for Health page. You can use the check boxes to select the types of resources you want to search.

you can construct your search using the following linking terms:

• AND - to make sure the words used appear in the results - this will limit your search results.
• OR - to create an either/or link to expand your search
• NOT - to exclude a word from a search (this will limit your search).
• EXACT PHRASE - by putting your search in “speech marks” you will search for the phrase as you type it. This technique also works with Google and other search engines and is a Fade top tip to find relevant material on the internet.

Advanced Search

The advanced search option allows you to select from the range of NLH resources for inclusion in your search. It also allows you to limit a search to materials from discrete date ranges and to particular elements of a record.

If you are logged into the library you can search accross the range of journals and e-resources available to you through your Athens password.

Just hit the search button when you’re ready to search.

Search results will be displayed by type in a results bar accross the top of the page.

The added advantage with logging in is you can of course save your search to return to at any point you log-in to NLH.

Saving Search Results

To save results requires you to be logged into Athens (which you can get from the NHS here, providing you work for the NHS). Check the check boxes of the items you want to save and then click the button. Alternatively just click on Save Search Result for individual items.

To retrieve items you’ve saved when you’ve logged in with your Athens password jsut click on the Saved Search Results link in the MY SEARCH section of the page.

This is also where you can find Saved Search Histories, Saved Search Criteria and your Search Profiles.

E-Mailing Search Results

You can e-mail individual search results by clicking on the More Details link. This will then bring up an e-mail form (shown below) which you can mail to yourself or a colleague you think will be interested in the item. It has space for you to add your own message.

Bringing Web 2.0 to Pubmed, GoPubMed provides a new slice’em and dice’em approach to searching. Instantly showing information about:

• What - references retrieved, what terms have been used to describe them and the quantity used, incredibly simple to use to narrow a search down to relevant material
• Who - who’s writing on the subject searches and in what quantity
• Where - what’s the geography of the material retrieved like
• When - when was material published

This is all done quickly and effectively and is impressive for finding material of relevance.

The feature that’ll be a Fade favourite is the statistical data on retrieved results that can be displayed.  This gives an overview of the literature located by a search by detailing information on:

• Top indexing terms
• Top authors
• Top countries of publication
• Top cities of publication
• Top journal titles material was published in
• Top years of publication
• Quantity of publications over time
• World map of the geography of citations located

There are features allowing you to assess the relevance of data mined terms if you become a curator at this service (not a painful process it just requires you to supply an email address) to help train the ontology-based search algorithms used here.  Maybe for later……

New from the Trip Database comes the Critical Care Trip Search which searches the following journals alongside core Trip resources.

Critical Care Medicine
Pediatric Critical Care Medicine
Intensive Care Medicine
American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine
Intensive Care Medicine
Critical Care Nurse
Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing
American Journal of Critical Care
Australian Critical Care
Anesthesiology
Anesthesia and Analgesia
British Journal of Anaesthesia
Anaesthesia

Advanced warning the Fade Nativity is on the way…

Searching for Quality Improvement material just got easier with the Healthcare Quality search from Trip. Journals currently searched are:

• International Journal for Quality in Health Care
• International journal of health care quality assurance
• Quality and Safety in Health Care
• Implementation Science
• Medical Informatics and Decision Making
• Medical Decision Making
• American Journal of Medical Quality
• Healthcare Benchmarks and Quality Improvement
• Journal for Healthcare Quality
• Journal of Nursing Care Quality
• Quality Management in Health Care

If you want some training in this or searching any other electronic resource and you work for Liverpool PCT use the contact form below to contact the Fade Library.

The web moves on, sometimes the thing you want from a page has gone but is still available in Google’s cache.  To show a page’s cache, use cache:

cache:www.dh.gov.uk

will  show the cached version of the Department of Health Page.

To display key information about a page use info: or id:

info:www.fadelibrary.wordpress.com

id:www.fadelibrary.wordpress.com

will retrieve basic information about this site.

To find information related to a particular site, try related:

related:www.fade.nhs.uk

Google can also be told how to search in addition to what to search for.

Searching for Definitions

Dictionary snowed under the blizzard of paper work on your desk? Maybe you can’t get at the Fade Library’s quick reference collection without a flurry of public transport use or a trip in the car? Use define: in Google (note the colon in the search below, it’s important)

define:public health

This will bring back definitions of public health.

Site Searching

You can target a google search at a particular site by typing site:[web address of site you want to restrict search to] e.g.

pandemic site:www.dh.gov.uk

Will search for pandemic resources on the Department of Health website only.

Search within a number range

You can search for sites within a number range by using the [number]..[number] format, which is great for limiting to material produced between certain dates. The search below looks for material on influenza pandemic as a concept but limits results to pages produced between 2006 and 2007.

pandemic influenza 2006..2007

Limiting Results to a Particular Filetype

The search shown below returns Care Pathways in an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format

care (pathway OR pathways):pdf

Identifying things Linking to Your Website

If you have a website and want to know who links to you the link: search will show what links Google has identified to your site e.g.

link:www.fade.nhs.uk

Excluding Words

Excluding a word from a search is simply a matter of putting a - infront of the word you want to exclude, e.g.

Data Protection Act -1984

Excludes from the search the previous version of the Data Protection Act so you should see only the 1998 Act. Be warned there are inherent dangers in doing this, if a useful site mentions both Acts it will be excluded in the results you see.

Including Words

To include a word in a search use the + .

care +pathway “pressure sores”

will find web pages with those terms in them. What it won’t do is find pathways as a word to include it you’d have in the search (+pathway OR +pathways).

Looking for Synonyms

Google makes provision for synonyms in a search by using the ~ (tilde) symbol so a search for:

~elderly “primary care”

will look for primary care and a variety of alternative terms for elderly e.g. older, senior etc. It’s not a perfect solution by any means but may help if you aren’t finding the material you expected to find. Perhaps a more controlled route to include synonyms is to use the OR search and place that search in brackets e.g.

(elderly OR “older people” OR aged) “primary care”

This will create a situation where only the terms you type in are searched (in the example above you could keep on going for a fair while with the synonyms!)

Looking for Multi-Form Words

Words can be slippery critters, especially when it comes to words that are sometimes hyphenated. If you use the hyphen, Google will search for all forms of the word, so a search for:

evidence-based

will find both evidence-based and evidence based

If you want help to improve your use of search engines or electronic resources and you work in Liverpool PCT you can contact the library using the form below:

How do you find what you want in Google? - Basic Searching

By typing the line:

Fade Library

into Google, you are telling it to find all web pages that contain both Fade AND Library. Hopefully what you’re looking for will be near the top of the search (there were 1,900,000 pages of links when I just looked!) and everything will be fine.

Phrase Searching

However if you type:

“Fade Library”

You’ll improve the search because Google will search for the phrase you’ve typed in and the search will be more precise as a result (it now tells me I have 22,500 pages of links!).

OR Searching

You can use OR (remember to type it in capital letters) to expand search results so typing

Fade OR “Lancashire Care” Library

Will find pages that relate to both the Fade Library and our colleagues and friends at Lancashire Care because Google searches for either Fade OR the phrase “Lancashire Care” in the same web page as the word Library (there’s 1,950,000 of them, note this number is bigger than that in the first search technique which illustrates that OR will expand the search.

If you want help to improve your use of search engines or electronic resources and you work in Liverpool PCT you can contact the library using the form below:

We love Google at Fade, we’re always using it.  But the first thing we do when faced with any new website or piece of print material is ask the question:

What is this trying to sell us? 

It’s not that we don’t trust anything, it’s just the natural healthy skepticism of the information professional.  The problem that Google presents us is we have to ask ourselves if we trust an awful lot of websites.  That’s why we like services like Intute. Fling into the mix our awareness that Google coverage is far from absolute and you’ll see why we get excited when we find search engines to add to our list of search sources.

Search Medica come from the people behind Pulse (OK, we tend to refer to this as one of the GP comics in our flippant Fade way!) and has several advantages as a search engine.  Like Intute it saves on some of the skepticism.  Material for a particular audience can be limited to that selected by that audience.  You can also limit stuff to NHS sites only, to UK content only or go wild and search the web generally (in which case load up the skepticism screens!).  So if you’re a:

• GP

• Pharmacist

• Nurse

• Medical Student

We’d say give it a go!

It’s always useful to remember that Google isn’t the only search engine on the block.  There are loads of them out  there and you should always use more than one for an internet search.  When we come across one we’ve not used before and like the look of we’ll let you know.  MedWorm is a search engine and RSS provider service. It collects updates from over 4500 authoritative data sources (growing each day) via RSS feeds. From the data collected, MedWorm provides new outgoing RSS feeds on various medical categories that you can subscribe to, via the free MedWorm online service, or another RSS reader of your choice like MyUpdate on NLH. The advantage of haveing a search tool using RSS is the speed of update and the ability to create a feed from a search makes this an interesting tool.

If you don’t know what RSS is you can check out the description on MedWorm itself or our post on ‘What is this RSS Thing?’. Alternatively if you work in Liverpool PCT you can ask on of the library staff to train you in the use of RSS to help you stay up-to-date.

If you want some training, give the library a yell using the contact form below.

….and if you’re a librarian don’t forget to check out LibWorm!

The image search on the National Library for Health is a cross database image search searching the following sources:

• DermIS

DermIS.net is the largest dermatology information service available on the internet. It offers elaborate image atlases (DOIA and PeDOIA) complete with diagnoses and differential diagnoses, case reports and additional information on almost all skin diseases.

• Gray’s Anatomy

The Bartleby.com edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body features 1,247 vibrant engravings—many in color—from the classic 1918 publication, as well as a subject index with 13,000 entries ranging from the Antrum of Highmore to the Zonule of Zinn.

• DermNet NZ

DermNet is the website of the New Zealand Dermatological Society Incorporated. We aim to present authoritative facts about the skin for consumers and health professionals. The site was launched in March 1996.

• Trauma.org

Largest Internet Trauma Care Site - Covers all aspects of injury prevention, evaluation and management. Includes an email Discussion group, Conference listings, Trauma Imagebank, Fellowship database. Home of Trauma Moulage on the Internet.

• ECG Library

12-lead ECG library Homepage. A collection of electrocardiograms. Learn electrocardiography by seeing examples of the various abnormalities.

• Virtual Pediatric Hospital

Virtual Pediatric Hospital is a digital library of pediatric information

• images.MD

images.MD compiles over 50,000 high-quality images spanning all of internal medicine, all derived from Current Medicines renowned series of illustrated atlases. Each image is accompanied by detailed and informative text written by over 2,000 contributing experts.

For bestuse of the search you’ll need your NHS Athens password.(To get an NHS Athens Password if you work for the NHS in the North West)If you want training in using this or any other e-resources contact the library using the form below:

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Text only. No markup allowed.

Netting the Evidence Google Search Engine searches over one hundred web sites (107) associated with the METHODOLOGY of evidence based practice and replaces the Netting the Evidence Resource List.

This is a great example of Google Co-op, Google’s personalised search engine being put into practice.

CareSearch is an Australian database that includes abstracts of articles from 12 palliative care journals that have not been indexed in the major electronic databases,  abstracts from Australian conferences from 1980 that deal with issues in palliative care, details Masters and PhD theses from Australian universities that deal with issues in palliative care and Australian Government documents, policy and research reports from agencies involved with palliative care.

It’s an additional resource for those involved in palliative care to be aware of.

It’s long been a frustration when searching the CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature) that it retrieves many US theses that always look like they are potentially useful material but have always been a complete pain to track down. However there is a chance that they may be available to you through ProQuest and its ProQuest Dissertations and Theses collection. It gives you access to around 10,000 dissertations. You’ll need your NHS Athens password to get at this resource (if you don’t have one and you work in the NHS in the North West you can register for it here).

If your in Liverpool PCT and want some help in using the Proquest resource, either for its dissertations or its large e-journal resource, contact us using the form below.

The key thing when reading anything is to read critically and this applies to web resources as much as anything in print. However there are times when the whole Cartesian thing can be a bit much. That’s when you should consider calling on Intute. Basically its a search engine of quality assessed websites so you know that material you find here is of reasonable quality. The sites listed are selected by subject specialists who write high quality descriptions of the resources.

Key portions of the tool in health are:

• Intute Health and Life Sciences - Medicine (the resource formerly known as OMNI)
• Intute Health and Life Sciences - Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health (the resource formerly known as NMAP)

However that’s not the limit of the goodies at Intute. It also has a valuable virtual training suite which offers great introductions to using the Internet for a number of disciplines which are worth dipping into both if you are relatively new to the web or just want a refresher.

If you want some training in searching on the Internet or a run through of the resources on Intute and you’re from Liverpool PCT, use the form below to contact us.

The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York are key players in Evidence Based Practice and Health Economics. They produce several databases in these areas but this post focus’ on NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED) which can be searched online at their site or as part of the Cochrane Library.

Why is this important for Commissioners?

Health care decision-makers need easy access to reliable information about the costs as well as the effects of drugs, treatments and procedures, to inform their decisions. Often using conventional bibliographic databases such as Medline these studies can be hard to identify and locate. NHS EED brings this sort of study together with the results of searches using other databases and hand/eye searches of paper material and evaluates the quality of the papers located.

Support in Using this Resource

If your in Liverpool PCT and need some training in searching the resource or want us to conduct a search for you, you can use the contact form below.

The TRIP database allows health professionals to easily find the highest-quality material available on the web - to help support evidence based practice. It searches a wide range of quality Evidence Based sources, including the local National Prescribing Centre’s MeReC materials, BestBETs, the full range of Evidence Based Journals from the BMJ (Evidence Based Medicine, Evidence Based Mental Health and Evidence Based Nursing that we’ve provided access to for you with your Athens password you register for it here can if you don’t have one) (you can see the full list here).

The database has a simple Google like interface up front and offers a great advanced search option for more complex searches. It also has Google like options for searching medical images and patient information leaflets. A search can also be used to create an RSS Feed that you can use in MyUpdate or your favourite Aggregator to keep up-to-date on the topic.

If you want some training using TRIP or any other search tools and you’re in Liverpool PCT contact the team at Fade using the form below.