In this issue:

The Director's Report

Do you have adequate searching skills?

New Full-text Databases available in the library

Can you locate an article electronically?

PDA News - Users group and wireless synching station

Pubmed Tips - "The Cubby"

Web Watcher - About Evidence Based Medicine

New Books

Dictionary of Medical Eponyms on the Web

Blast from the Past!

Update Archives

WEB WATCHER
ABOUT... EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE
by Kathleen Crea, MLS, 6th Year, AHIP
Information & Education Services Librarian

The worldwide trend towards developing standardized criteria, filters, guidelines and meta-analysis tools to support clinical decision-making continued to proliferate in 2002. Highlighted below is an eclectic (and necessarily brief) list of Evidence-Based Medicine websites, journals or subscription products available to the UCHC community.

• Our OVID database subscription provides access for Health Center users to the Cochrane Library, a multi-part collection of systematic reviews of current medical research. To get to Cochrane, connect to our Databases page, at http://libdatabase.uchc.edu/databases/databases.asp then click on "OVID". Once in OVID, choose "All EBM Reviews" to search by clinical topic. For more information on what the Cochrane Library is and how to use it, go directly to the Cochrane Collaboration site (U.K.) at http://www.cochrane.org/
  
  
• Try PubMed's Clinical Queries search tool, a prepackaged way of searching the medical literature using EBM-specific filters, from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/clinical.html
  
  
• Highwire Press offers a list of journals available through their site, selected by frequency of articles covering topics on "Evidence-Based Practice": http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/allsites.dtl?view=by+topic Once there, go to Medical Sciences and click on "Evidence Based Practice" for a list of 130+ journal titles (which is updated monthly).
  
  
• British Medical Journal has been a forerunner in educating clinicians about applying principals of evidence-based medicine. A series of classic articles - such as "How to Read A Paper" - are available (for free) from http://bmj.com/collections/read.shtml
  
  
• The Library subscribes to two online specialty journals which focus on EBM:
  

  • ACP Journal Club http://www.acpjc.org/
  • Evidence-Based Medicine http://ebm.bmjjournals.com/
    
    
• On my "Big List" of links, there are 10+ EBM links from worldwide academic institutions, at http://library.uchc.edu/eduoff/sites.html ... click on "evidence based medicine". I especially recommend a site from the U.K., Netting the Evidence, a truly comprehensive educational site for tutorials, methods and background papers on EBM.
  
  
• Finally, in September 2002, the Library began subscriptions to two renowned clinical databases that emphasize EBM filters: Up To Date and InfoRetriever. For more on these new resources, check out the New Databases article in this issue of UPDATE.