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.

Google Quick Tip #5

Many of you have probably searched Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) to find research papers and other scholarly publications. As you come across interesting material, did you know that you can easily send them to your RefWorks or EndNote account?

GOOGLE QUICK TIP #5

Follow these three steps to set up this feature in any browser window:

(1) In Google Scholar, select the Scholar Preferences in the upper right of the page
(2) On the Preferences page, scroll down to the bottom, select the option for Show links to import citations into, and in the dropdown menu, select the appropriate bibliographic management software that you use (ie, RefWorks)

(3) Select the Save Preferences link

Returning to your Google Scholar search results, you will see a new link under each result that reads Import into RefWorks. Selecting that link will open a new browser window prompting me to sign into my RefWorks account. View this brief demo.

This feature will work in any browser window. So if you are searching on a computer that is not yours, you can easily save these same settings when you open a Google Scholar window and follow the steps described above.

Remember that if you are a member of UCSF, you can create a RefWorks account for free since the UCSF Library has purchased a site license.

PubMed Clinical Queries

Ever wish there was a quick way to find good evidence-based clinical medicine articles in PubMed? There is a great PubMed feature called Clinical Queries that can help you do just that. There is a link to it in the left menu bar of PubMed.

Clinical Queries allows you to find articles that relate to one of the following clinical study categories:
- etiology - diagnosis - therapy - prognosis
- clinical prediction guidelines
- systematic reviews

You can also use the Limits tab to further narrow and focus your search results.

View this brief video to see a demonstration of how to search PubMed Clinical Queries.

Audio and Video Podcasts of Lectures (article)

There is ever-increasing use of podcasts of lectures in higher education. Along with this comes concerns of whether this form of delivering education may decrease class attendance and if podcasts truly improve student learning.

The article below addresses these issues and sheds light for those of you who currently podcast or are thinking of podcasting your lectures.

Copley, J. (2007). Audio and Video Podcasts of Lectures for Campus-Based Students: Production and Evaluation of Student Use. Innovations in education and teaching international, 44(4), 387-399.

ABSTRACT
Podcasting has become a popular medium for accessing and assimilating information and podcasts are increasingly being used to deliver audio recordings of lectures to campus-based students. This paper describes a simple, cost-effective and file size-efficient method for producing video podcasts combining lecture slides and audio without a requirement for any specialist software. The results from a pilot scheme delivering supplementary lecture materials as audio and video podcasts are also presented, including data on download patterns and responses to a survey of students on podcast use. These results reveal students' enthusiasm for podcast recordings of lecture materials and their primary use by students in revision and preparation for assessments. Survey responses also suggest little likely impact on lecture attendance as a consequence of podcasting, but indicate that podcast recordings of lectures may not be effective in facilitating mobile learning.