Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Medical Education Subject Guide: Your Go-To Resource
Look no further than the Medical Education Subject Guide available on the UCSF Library's website. The direct URL to this guide is at http://guides.library.ucsf.edu/meded.
OR you can navigate from the Library's website from the Classes, Consulting, & Help dropdown menu by selecting the Subject Guides listing. The Medical Education guide is listed alphabetically on the complete guides page.
(1) Browse the yellow tabs to explore the Library's resources available to assist in your medical education research needs.
(2) Read the latest published medical education research by UCSF medical educators.
(3) Download PDF tipsheets summarizing literature searching tips for how to search PubMed and other key databases geared to medical education.
(4) Contact me via chat, email, or phone from the right margin of the guide.
Please feel free to send me any suggestions you have for content you'd like to see on this subject guide. Bookmark this site today! http://guides.library.ucsf.edu/meded
Monday, September 21, 2009
Academic Search Complete database
- Multidisciplinary topics
- Scholarly peer-reviewed journals, popular magazines, newspapers, books, book chapters, book reviews, government documents, conference proceedings, and reports
- Full text articles, books, and reports
- Coverage from 1887 to the present
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Test Your Medical Knowledge Using Case Files in AccessMedicine
The AccessMedicine database is a good source to find Case Files to test your knowledge on real life clinical cases.
(1) Select either the Case Files tab or the Case Files for Students link (see image below)
(2) View the cases by Organ Systems or by Specialty
(3) After reading the details of the case, proceed to the Questions tab; select the View Answers link on the bottom of the page to see if you were correct
(4) The other topics covered with the case are Clinical Correlation, Comprehension Questions to further test your knowledge, clinical Pearls, and References to find out more information
The cases are from the LANGE Case Files series edited by Dr. Eugene C. Toy.
There is also a link to listen to free audio cases.
This Clinical Cases feature in AccessMedicine is ideal for teachers and students alike:
TEACHERS - browse the cases to get an idea of how to write your own case files for students
STUDENTS - apply and assess your knowledge of material you've covered; use these cases as a group discussion project to help you understand concepts.
View this brief non-narrated tutorial to see the Case Files feature in AccessMedicine.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
BEME Collaboration
What's this now you speak of - BEME? What's that?
BEME stands for the Best Evidence Medical Education and is pronounced "bee-mee".
The BEME Collaboration is based in the United Kingdom. They describe themselves as:
"a group of individuals or institutions who are committed to the promotion of Best Evidence Medical Education through:
the dissemination of information which allows medical teachers, institutions and all concerned with medical education to make decisions on the basis of the best evidence available
the production of appropriate systematic reviews of medical education which reflect the best evidence available and meet the needs of the user, and
the creation of a culture of best evidence medical education amongst individual teachers, institutions and national bodies.
Published Reviews: provide systematic reviews of medical education topics ranging from assessment to faculty development
(ie, BEME Guide No 10 - A systematic review of the literature on the effectiveness of self-assessment in clincal education)
Reviews in Progress: view many of the drafts of current reviews being completed
Of course, be sure to explore the other sections. The "starting a review" section is a very helpful guide if you are preparing to write a systematic review.
You will have a greater appreciation for the concept of evidence-based education research after you've perused the wealth of information in BEME.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Turning the Pages of Historical Medical Texts
The interactive books are quite beautiful. For example, you can flip through the pages of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). This book is revered as "one of the most influential books in the history of Western medicine."
'It was conceived and written by 28-year-old Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), a professor at the University of Padua. Vesalius was both a gifted dissector and a learned scholar whose great contribution was to apply to anatomy the critical methods developed by the Renaissance humanist scholars."
Below is one of the famous images from Vesalius's series of skeletal men. This one shows a skeleton "contemplating human mortality."
Some features to point out when browsing any of these online books:
- Click on a page to advance to the next page. Click on the left page to go back a page.
- Unless you can read Latin, I suggest you click on the speaker icon to hear the narrator describe content on the pages you are viewing.
- Use the magnifying glass icon to zoom over the text.
- Hover the mouse over sections of the page and you can read curatorial notes describing the content.
- Click the "T" icon to the left of the page to see the transcript of the audio for that page.
- You can also print a page if you wish.
Even if you're not a historical book fanatic, I encourage you to browse these pages. It's a privilege to be able to see the details of a book written in 1543.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
MedlinePlus - a Superb Health Resource
MedlinePlus (http://medlineplus.gov/) is a resource that debuted in 1998 put together by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Each and every resource on this site has been reviewed by the NIH and NLM. There are absolutely no advertisements on this website. Resources include health websites, news and research articles, drug information, medical encyclopedia and dictionary, organizational directories, images and videos, tutorials, clinical trials information, and multi-lingual patient handouts.
#1 Reason for using MedlinePlus instead of Google to search a health topic on the web: It saves you time!
As soon as I learned about MedlinePlus 3.5 years ago, I trained myself to go straight there, instead of Google, to get more information on a health topic if I'm not using a formal database, such as PubMed. Because each result in a MedlinePlus search has been pre-screened by the NIH and NLM, you can be confident that the information is accurate and trustworthy. The annoyance of having to guess what's reliable health information on a Google search is squelched when you use MedlinePlus.
Here are tips on how to best search MedlinePlus:
(1) Browse the Health Topics link to get a good overview of how the site is organized.
The page of any topic that you navigate to, ie breast cancer, will have a table organizing information into the categories of Basics, Learn More, Multimedia & Cool Tools, Research, Reference Shelf, and For You.
(2) When you use the search box to look for information, use the topics listed in the left menu of the results page to narrow your results.
Choosing a listing that has (National Library of Medicine) will get you to the same summary page on a topic as you found by navigating in the Health Topics section.
(3) Use the Drug & Supplements, Medical Encylcopedia, and Dictionary links to search any specific drug or medical term.
The results on these links can usually get you to your specific topic quicker than if you searched a term in the general search box.
(4) Use the Directories link to find doctors, dentists, hospitals/clinics, health care providers and facilities.
This feature can be especially helpful when you need to find specialists in a particular region of the U.S.
(5) The Other Resources link gets you to a list of medical organizations listed alphabetically and also by health topic.
This is helpful when you need to find any organizations that could help you or your patient find out more about resources on a specific topic.
(6) The Multiple Languages link provides health topics in over 40 languages!
For example, if you have a Hmong patient who needs literature about childhood immunization, MedlinePlus will provide that for you.
On the right side of the MedlinePlus homepage are four specialized resources:
Interactive Tutorials - this page provides extremely well-made and easy to follow tutorials that cover health topics and medical procedures.
Clinical Trials.gov - the NIH database of clinical trials. This is definitely a key resource when you need to find information on clinical trials.
Senior Health - the information is specific to older adults. The text size and color contrast are easily adjustable to be more readible. There is even a "Speech" option to have the text narrated to the viewer if they are having trouble reading the words.
Surgery Videos
- this is an extensive collection of one-hour pre-recorded webcasts of surgical procedures. This can be helpful if you are interested in learning about a procedure or can stomach the details of an upcoming surgery that you or someone you know may be undergoing.
REMINDER:
Try it out and let me know if I've managed to win you over!
Friday, November 21, 2008
Wikipedia: Love It or Leave It?
For example, if you search myasthenia gravis in Google, Wikipedia is the FIRST result to appear. This entry beats out results from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and from the Mayo Clinic! What is at the top of a Google results list is the most linked to page on the search topic, not necessarily the most accurate or relevant page.
Over the past two years, I've noticed that some medical students cite Wikipedia as their source in writing up a short assignment. As an education librarian, this makes me twinge just the slightest bit and sigh. I teach students that Wikipedia can be a good place to start to get an overview of information, but it's NOT a resource you should cite. This is especially true if you are researching a health topic. But again, convenience wins out and some students cite Wikipedia anyway.
Wikipedia is a bit like the game of telephone that we played as children. The first person whispers the sentence to the person next to them, and as we all know, by the time the last person has received the information, it has morphed itself. That's the thing with Wikipedia and health information - most of it is quite good, but to cite it as your main resource could be risky. If by chance the information you gathered is inaccurate, you run a risk of doing harm with this information if you choose to make a medical decision for a patient based on what you find in Wikipedia.
So how then to make Wikipedia useful for finding more reliable information?
Thankfully, a well built Wikipedia entry has bread crumbs to lead you down the path to better sources of information.
(1) Look for the References link in the Contents box to see what resources were cited
(2) If a piece of information sounds interesting, look for a reference citation number (and click on it) at the end of that sentence.
(3) If it's a well-researched topic, you will see research articles listed. Clicking on the PMID or PMC link at the end of an article title will get you to the abstract in PubMed.
(4) Under the External links at the bottom, there may also be useful associations and other websites
Want to know how often a page has been edited?
Click on the history tab at the top of the page. You can see how busy people have been editing this information. Frequent editing should be a red flag of how much you can trust the information to be accurate.
Reuter's published an interesting article this month entitled Wikipedia often omits important drug information.
What's my final say on Wikipedia?
- If you find yourself on a Wikipedia result, it can be a lauching pad for finding better resources to link to and to cite those reliable resources instead of Wikipedia.
- It's a good place to get a gist of a topic.
I'm glad to see in the presentation below that a doctoral student in Communications at the University of Buffalo (SUNY) expressed his views on Wikipedia and how it can be used in education:
Friday, October 31, 2008
CDC Statistics and Slide Sets
Here are different ways of getting to stats from the CDC homepage:
(1) Browse the topics under the Data & Statistics section on the right side of the CDC homepage.
(2) Under the Diseases & Conditions section, a statistics link is often in the left margin of major health topic pages. For example, Heart Disease.
(3) Browse the Injury, Violence & Safety section for statistical information in the left margins of the topic pages. For example, Injury Data and Maps.
View this short narrated video below that shows how to find statistics and slide sets on particular topics.
Finding Dissertations
The Digital Dissertations database can be accessed on campus or via VPN off-campus.
You can access:
- Abstracts of dissertations and theses from other Universities that you can order
- Abstracts of doctoral dissertations (post-1980) and for masters' theses (post-1988)
- Content dating back to 1861
View this brief narrated tutorial to learn how to search the Digital Dissertations database.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Finding Health Information in Different Languages
MedlinePlus.gov
This fantastic website is put together by the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine. At the bottom left of their homepage, you will see the new highlighted listing of Multiple Languages. There are over 40 languages available covering various health topics.
Healthy Roads Media
This resource provides health information in 17 languages. Information is available as PDF handouts, and where available, audio and video. You can read more information about this resource. The contributors to Health Roads Media cover a variety of organizations.
Please post a comment to this posting to share any other resources that you've found helpful for finding multi-lingual health resources.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Finding Statistics Using the CDC Website
I suggest that you start by browsing the Data & Statistics by Topic section, as well as the links in the box titled Top Data & Stats Links.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Science Citation Index's New Look
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Slideshare.net - Search for PPT presentations
Why's it so great?
1) It's a collection of user-posted ppt presentations
2) It's easy to search - just use the search box at the very top right
3) You can upload your own presentations to the site
I ran a search on the words teaching learning and got these results.
I searched on the words obesity diabetes and found a great CDC ppt with vital statistics on obesity.
To view a presentation in full screen mode, click on the
Monday, January 28, 2008
Faculty of 1000 Medicine
Each article is classified by its type of scientific advance:
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Constructing Better Multiple-Choice Test Questions
The hero to the rescue for building strong multiple-choice test questions is the Contructing Written Test Questions For the Basic and Clinical Sciences manual produced by the National Board of Medical Examiners.
There are four sections that cover:
1) Issues regarding format and structure of test questions
2) Writing one-best-answer questions for the basic and clinical sciences
3) Extended-matching items
4) Additional issues (with appendices)
There is a PDF of the entire manual available. If you prefer not to print all 180 pages out at once, you can also view each section individually.
Faculty at the Univ of Pennsylvania School of Medicine also put together a 38-slide powerpoint presentation based on this manual and used it as part of a faculty development series.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Super Searching Website
Features to explore:
- PubMed searching
- Citation tracking
- Tidbits - currently a collection of suggested PubMed search terms that relate to medical education research
There are links to video demonstrations of what is being described, so be sure to check those out.
Soon to be added will be tips on how to search specific education databases for more literature that you can find about teaching and learning in the broader scope of education that is outside of medical education.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Places to Submit Your Medical Education Projects
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
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
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.
(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








