“The Clinics in North America” – one stop shopping

The “Clinics in North America” series of journals have long been a leading source of excellent review articles. Each “Clinics” issue will focus its content upon a single topic. For example, the March 08 issue of “Medical Clinics in North America” is a review on hospital care and hospital medicine and includes articles such as “Care Transitions for Hospitalized Patients”, “Pain Management in the Hospitalized Patient”, “End-of-Life Care for the Hospitalized Patient” and “The State of Hospital Medicine in 2008”. All of the available online clinics series can be browsed or searched using MD Consult. Open MD Consult from the left navigation bar of the library home page and then choose “The Clinics” on the blue bar at the top of the page.

Library Corner Blog Now Available (Monday Memo 5/5/08)

Starting today, all of the “Library Corner” entries in Monday Memo will also be available in blog format at http://familymedlibrarycorner.blogspot.com/. We have added all of the entries since the first library corner in October of last year and will continue to post future entries as well. This blog is searchable so if you are looking for a past tip, type a keyword into the “search blog” box and you should easily find an entry from the archive. Or, you can browse the postings newest to oldest as well. Lastly, if you are now in the process of setting up RSS feeds (based on last-week’s Library Corner), you can even subscribe to this blog in your RSS reader! (just look for the “Subscribe To” button at the bottom of the blog page).

RSS Feeds – a new way to keep current (Monday Memo 4/28/08)

Do you try to keep current with the literature through e-mail alerts but find that your inbox just gets too full? An answer to this problem is RSS feeds. Many of the major medical journals, PubMed, plus many of your favorite news and sports sites offer RSS feeds. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. All you need to do is a) set up a reader (such as Google Reader or My Yahoo), and b) sign up for your alerts to be posted there. Then, when you are ready to check your alerts, go to your page and you will see them all in one place. Want more information or help setting up RSS? Check with Len Levin (len.levin@umassmed.edu) or Jim Comes (james.comes@umassmed.edu) in the Lamar Soutter Library for detailed instructions or a copy of our RSS handout.

Finding full text in QUIN (Monday Memo 4/16/08)

Here are two quick tips. If you are looking for the fulltext of an article, try QUIN, the library’s online catalog. QUIN offers access to over 14,000 fulltext journals. The list includes many journals which may not be indexed in Medline. Also, an efficient strategy to access Family Medicine oriented journal articles is through PubMed. Type in the phrase, Clinical Inquiries, and you will retrieve more than 700 articles. You can combine the phrase, Clinical Inquiries and a topic, i.e. knee injury.

Single Citation Matcher (Monday Memo 3/18/08)

You have probably been in this situation before. You remember an article that you read some time ago but can not remember all of the citation details. Or you are discussing a case with a colleague and the colleague says “there was a great article on just that topic in American Family Physician back in 2003.” Both PubMed and OVID/MEDLINE have a “Citation Matching” tool. In OVID, it is the second tab from the left above the search box. In PubMed, it is located on the blue left-hand navigation bar under PubMed Services. Just enter the pieces of information you know about the article and OVID or PubMed will try to find a match.

Cross e-Book Searching using StatRef! (Monday Memo 3/17/08)

One of the benefits of electronic books is that most of them can be easily searched – something very helpful for medical references that are rarely read cover-to-cover. With StatRef!, an electronic book package carried by the Lamar Soutter Library, you can search 36 high quality title simultaneously. Included in our StatRef! package are titles such as 5-Minute Clinical Consult (edited by our own Frank Domino), Family Medicine Principles & Practice, the Merck Manual and a number of the titles in the Current Diagnosis and Treatment series. You can find StatRef! under our “Online Books” link on the library web site’s left-hand navigation bar.

Frustrated because you can't get UpToDate off campus? (Monday Memo 3/3/08)

We have a similar product called eMedicine that works much like UpToDate and IS available via proxy from off site. As in UpToDate, you can search or browse for content. But unique to eMedicine is that each online article is structured in a similar format. Need info on a Differential Diagnosis? Link straight to that section of the article. Same thing for workup, treatment, following and, in many cases, prevention and screening. eMedicine is located on the library home page on the left "quick links" bar just below UpToDate.

OVID Launches new interface (Monday Memo 2/11/08)

Have you seen the new OVID interface yet? You will find the same databases and same functionality as before but with a whole new look. Here are a few things to keep in mind when searching the new OVID: The start page is now called “advanced search” but works similar to the start page of the former OVID interface. Limits and search history are now hidden as a default – just click the right-pointing arrow next to Limits (in the green box) and Search History (in the blue box) to open. The Result Manger (where you can save and e-mail your results) now appears of the left instead of the bottom of the screen. Also on the left is the brand-new Search Aid tool. When you conduct a new search, you are now automatically taken directly to your displayed results list - use the scroll bar to move back to the top of the page to see your search history and other options. There are many more new features in addition to these and we would be happy to meet with you individually or as a group for a quick review – just let us know. – Len Levin (len.levin@umassmed.edu) and Jim Comes (james.comes@umassmed.edu).

Global Health Database (Monday Memo 1/7/08)

New to the OVID suite of databases offered by the Lamar Soutter Library is Global Health. Global Health provides an alternative, complementary point of reference and includes citations from foreign language journals, books, research reports, patents and standards, dissertations, conference proceedings, annual reports, public health, developing country information, and other difficult to obtain material. Specialized subject matter includes communicable diseases, human nutrition, medicinal plants and community and public health. Like MEDLINE and our many other resources, full-text linking, when available, is presented at the citation level. And if you have searched MEDLINE using the OVID platform in the past, you will be happy to find that the search features work the same. To access Global Health, open the Lamar Soutter Library webpage and click OVID on the left-hand navigation bar.

Virtual Catalog (Monday Memo 12/10/07)

While the Lamar Soutter Library offers a large number of quality medical information resources, there are times when you may need or want something else. You can often find that something else through the Virtual Catalog. With the Virtual Catalog, you can access books from the 19 member libraries of the Boston Library Consortium. This group of libraries includes both academic and public libraries. Using Virtual Catalog, you can find books on other subjects you may need for your work or novels to read simply for pleasure. And, the best part is that the service is free. Books are delivered to the Lamar Soutter Library and can be checked out for 42 days. All you need to enter the system is your library barcode. Find the link for the Virtual Catalog on the left navigation bar of the Lamar Soutter Library’s home page.

Medical Letter of Drugs & Therapeutics (Monday Memo 12/3/07)

The Lamar Soutter Library now offers online access to the Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics and its companion publication Treatment Guidelines. The Medical Letter, published by the non-profit Consumers Union, offers peer-reviewed critical appraisals of new drugs as well as comparative reviews of older drugs. Included in the online version of the Medical Letter is the ability to search and browse the archives back to 1988 and the immensely popular Handbook of Antimicrobial Therapy. Access the Medical Letter and the Treatment Guidelines through the online journals pages (browse under M) of the Lamar Soutter Library web site.

Best Evidence and the Journal of Family Practice (Monday Memo 11/12/07)

Many of you are probably aware of the “Clinical Inquiries” features that are regularly published in the Journal of Family Practice. These articles are great windows into best evidence from a family medicine perspective. Here is a simple way to use PubMed to find Clinical Inquiries articles going back to when they first began in 2001. 1) Open PubMed from the Lamar Soutter Library home page, 2) copy this search string: "J Fam Pract"[Journal:__jrid4734] AND "clinical inquiries", 3) paste it into the PubMed search box and then add your topic (for example: "J Fam Pract"[Journal:__jrid4734] AND "clinical inquiries" AND ADHD). As we have this journal available in full-text, you will be able to click straight through from the citation to the entire article. Would you like to set up an alert service so that new Clinical Inquiries come to your e-mail inbox each month? Contact Len Levin or Jim Comes in the library and we can help you do so by setting up a free MyNCBI account.