Google Quick Tip #16

Twiddling your thumbs and wanting something to read that's not just today's headline news? How about getting your hands on some magazines to pass the time?!

GOOGLE TIP #16

Since December 2008, Google has made available archived and current issues of popular magazines that you can browse on the web. There is no comprehensive list of magazine titles. By clicking the browser's Refresh button several times, you can see the covers of several of the magazines.

Example of some magazines currently available:

Popular Science, Ebony, New York, Women's Health, Baseball Digest, Popular Mechanics, Runner's World, Better Nutrition, Organic Gardening

You can browse page by page of these fully scanned issues.

When viewing an issue, in the right column is a link to the Contents and Browse All Issues

If you have an iPhone or other mobile device that lets you surf the Internet, let me know if you can browse these magazines. In the meantime, if you'd like to know the foods to eat to boost your energy as a runner, peruse these pages.

View this short narrated video to see the features of browsing magazines in Google.

The Doctor's Channel

Ever wish that you could get a quick update on what doctors are telling each other about the latest treaments? Wish you could watch rather than read the latest updates in medicine? Well, wish no further, The Doctor's Channel is here.


The Doctor's Channel describes itself as an "educational YouTube for doctors." It was created by New York physicians, David Best and Michael Banks.

These great videos are short, 1 to 3 minutes. Topics span 35 medical specialties, tips for medical students and educators, as well as newscasts from Reuters Health. Transcripts of the video and citation of the article being referenced are available below each video. Scroll down to the very bottom of the page to see related videos.

Here's a sampling of the site's content:

* Emergency Medicine
Preoperative briefings reduce operating room delays

* Medical Students - Listening to your patients
- Top 10 Tips for Residency Interviews
- Top 10 Tips for Matching Successfully

* Business of Medicine - Concierge physicians

Wordle to Create a Visual Cluster of Concepts

I celebrated my birthday on January 20th. What a day! The entire day, I felt like a surfer riding a never-ending wave, thrilled and exuberant. Sitting with a large UCSF crowd on campus, I watched President Obama's swearing in and Inaugural Address . The celebration that day didn't stop until I finally turned off the tv after NightLine.

So what's this big prelude leading to? I wanted to share a novel tool called Wordle that allows you to paste in any text and have it create a visual representation, called a word cloud, of the major themes of the content. I tried Wordle out for the first time by pasting in the transcript of Obama's Inaugural Address. Below is the word cloud generated.

Creating the word cloud is very easy:

(1) Go to http://www.wordle.net & select the Create link at the top
(2) Paste in text or the URL of the site you want to Wordle
(3) Select Go or Submit
(4) When the word cloud is generated, you can change the layout, font, and color

I also created a word cloud of an abstract for the article below:

Dunn, LB, Iglewicz, A, & Moutier, C. (2008). A conceptual model of medical student well-being: promoting resilience and preventing burnout. Academic psychiatry, 32(1), 44-53.

Have fun with Wordle! It paints a picture that gives words an extra dimension.

PubMed Quick Tip #9

Ever wonder how you can create an permanent HTML link that takes you to the results of a particular PubMed search?

Here's how:

(1) Run a PubMed search
(2) Select the Details tab below the search box
(3) Select the URL button in the middle of the Details page
(4) Copy the URL generated at the top of the page in the web address box
(5) Paste the URL into a website, wiki, email, document - anywhere you'd want to have it available

When you click on the link generated, you will always be taken to the results of that search in PubMed. This is a handy trick, if say, you want a link on a website you are maintaining, that takes you to all of the publications by David Irby that are listed in PubMed.

This non-narrated quick video tutorial shows you how.