Monday, May 31, 2010

Google Quick Tip #28

Have you noticed that there are two links in the left menu of a Google search results page?

Hats off to you if your curiosity has gotten the better of you, and you've clicked on those links to see what's hiding under there. Or if you've ignored those links, as I did for a few weeks, you'll be happily surprised by what's hiding under those sidebar links.

GOOGLE QUICK TIP #28

By clicking on either the More or
Show search tools dropdown arrows in the left menu of a Google results page, you can further narrow the results to quickly find a more relevant set.

Watch this short non-narrated tutorial to see these links in action


Clicking on the More arrow lets you filter results by format type, such as:
- Images -Videos -Maps -Blogs -Books & -Discussions

TIP:
Clicking on the Discussions category displays online conservations going on out there in the Internet on whatever your search topic is. This can be a great tool for getting a pulse of what different opinions are out there on your topic.

Clicking on the Show search tools arrow further limits or rearranges your results. Some features of note that are particularly helpful are:

- results from the past month, past day, past hour, etc.
- can rearrange results by date rather than the default order by relevance
- Related searches can pull together results that were not part of your original search
- Wonder wheel is a cool visual tool that dynamically changes the results based on topics you select from a central image representing the results on the right

Thank goodness for Google constantly trying to improve their user experience. Hopefully these new features will help you quickly unearth more useful information from amongst the usual pages and pages of results you get when you search Google.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

PubMed Quick Tip #13: Creating Results Filters

If you've ever been overwhelmed by the loads and loads of results you may get from a PubMed search, there's a trick to make it a pain-free experience to review your search results.

Creating Filters will allow you to very quickly skim through your search results to look for some highly relevent papers.

Watch this non-narrated quick video below to see how to set up filters for higher levels of evidence literature


Here's how:

(1) Sign into your MyNCBI account. (If you don't have one, register for one for free at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/register)

(2) Click on the MyNCBI link at the top right of PubMed

(3) Select the Search Filters link in the left menu bar

(4) Select the PubMed listing under the Choose a database section at the bottom of the page

(5) Click on the Search for Filters tab

(6) Search each one of these following terms and check the corresponding box in front of each listing (meta-analysis, systematic reviews, randomized controlled trial, clinical trial, review)


To see the filters in action, run a search in PubMed (after signing into your MyNCBI account) and in the right menu of the results page will be the filters that you set up, allowing you to easily jump to just those types of papers in the results.


EXTRA TIP

You can add up to 15 filters. There are interesting options to explore if you go back to searching filters (see steps 5 & 6 above). For example, you can search on Qualitative to add filters for qualitative research.