Monday, July 2, 2007

Places to Submit Your Medical Education Projects

As your research and projects progress, you may find yourself just itching to share with the world the learning materials you have created . The resources listed below are good places to browse and see what other types of online learning are out there.

These are some great places to consider submitting your online learning materials projects (ie, online tutorials, videos, images, slides, etc) :

MedEd Portal - this is a AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) database that contains peer-reviewed online learning modules. Create a free account to view the full materials.

Merlot - stands for Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching . This database contains online learning materials that include topics outside of medicine, as well as the health sciences.

Heal - stands for Health Education Assets Library. This database contains images and other learning objects that are used for medical education.

ERIC - an Education Database

It's always a good idea to explore what other research has been going on in the field of education in general. You may be able to apply what's happening in other fields to medical education. Cross-pollination of ideas is always a good thing.

The ERIC Database is an ideal database to look for other education literature.

Using the Advanced Search feature is the best way to search ERIC.

In addition to articles, you also get access to conference proceedings, book materials, and documents. These additional types of literature are not found in PubMed. Many of the medical education articles DO overlap with those in PubMed.

Who has Cited an Article

When you've found an article that looks like it has some great information, it's helps to know who else has cited this paper.

Knowing who has cited a paper can lead to other papers that you may not have found in your literature searching.

The Science Citation Index (aka the Web of Science) database is an ideal resource to use.

- use this icon on the Science Citation Index homepage

(1) Enter the author's name and year of publication & run the search

(2) Look for the corresponding journal that published the article & select the View Record link for that listing to get to the abstract

(3) Select Times Cited to get a listing of other articles that have cited this paper

Saving a Search in PubMed

Once you've formulated a search that is giving you a good set of results related to your topic, you definitely want to save it so that you don't have to recreate the search from scratch each time you go to PubMed.

PubMed has an online tutorial to show you how.

The Library also has some quick tutorials demonstrating how to save a search using RSS Feeds:

PubMed RSS Feeds - Learn how to save a PubMed search so that you can view updates at any time.

Firefox Live Bookmarks - Learn a convenient way to view RSS updates in a Firefox browser.

How to Subscribe to a Journal's Table of Contents Using PubMed

It's super convenient to have PubMed email you the latest table of contents of a journal that you want to track. This beats going to the publisher's site every month to check on what's in the latest issue.

Follow these quick steps:

(1) Connect to the Single Citation Matcher link in the left menu bar of PubMed

(2) Start to type in the journal title you want to track & select the title that matches & hit "Go"

(3) On the next screen, click on the Save Search link that's to the right of the search box

(4) Sign into your My NCBI account (you can set one up for free under Register)

(5) Select Yes to receive email updates

(6) Set the Maximum number of records to send to 100

PubMed Quick Tip #2

How to Find MeSH terms Assigned to a Particular Article

Every article in PubMed is assigned MeSH (medical subject heading) terms to help classify the topics of a paper.

Knowing the MeSH terms assigned to an article you are interested in can help you refine your search.

Select the Citation Display of an abstract that you find interesting. MeSH terms will appear below the abstract