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!

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.

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 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.