Faculty of 1000 Medicine

The next time you are looking for a research paper for journal club or small group discussion, consider searching the Faculty of 1000 Medicine database. My nickname for it is F1000M. The UCSF Library has a trial subscription until June.

A selected faculty of nearly 2500 international clinicians and researchers, 25 whom are from UCSF, review medical articles and score them with one of three ratings:

F1000 Factor 3 = Recommended

F1000 Factor 6 = Must Read

F1000 Factor 9 = Exceptional

The beauty of this database is that each article record IS the reviewer's comments. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of deciding if an article is something you'd want to discuss.

F1000M can be a nice compliment to searching PubMed. It's definitely a quick way to find good papers fast.

I suggest using the Advanced Search interface or to Browse by topics in the left menu. You'll notice that there is no listing for the topic of Pediatrics. However, if you select one of the topics, ie Psychiatry, you can see that in the subsets of that category are pediatric specific topics.

There are handy features for each record:

*** a How to cite this evaluation link below each comment *** links to related articles *** links to Google Scholar to check if anyone has cited this work *** the ability to download a citation to EndNote or RefWorks

Each article is classified by its type of scientific advance:

*** New Finding *** Important Confirmation *** Technical Advance

*** Controversial Finding *** Interesting Hypothesis, or ***Refutation

For more info, view a short demo (non-narrated).

Try F1000M and let us know what you think. Your comments matter to us and aid in our decision to purchase or not a subscription for UCSF. Feel free to comment to this blog posting or email us your comments.