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Thoughts on the PubMed Clinical Queries Redesign
Added 2010-07-09: It is possible to enter the set numbers again, but the results are not yet reliable. They are probably working on it. Last Wednesday (June 30th 2010) the PubMed Clinical Queries were...
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Kaleidoscope 2: 2010 wk 31
Almost a year ago I started a new series Kaleidoscope, with a “kaleidoscope” of facts, findings, views and news gathered over the last 1-2 weeks. It never got beyond the first edition. Perhaps the...
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Collaborating and Delivering Literature Search Results to Clinical Teams...
There seem to be two camps in the library, the medical and many other worlds: those who embrace Web 2.0, because they consider it useful for their practice and those who are unaware of Web 2.0 or think...
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How will we ever keep up with 75 Trials and 11 Systematic Reviews a Day?
An interesting paper was published in PLOS Medicine [1]. As an information specialist and working part time for the Cochrane Collaboration* (see below), this topic is close to my heart. The paper,...
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Problems with Disappearing Set Numbers in PubMed’s Clinical Queries
In some upcoming posts I will address various problems related to the changing interfaces of bibliographic databases. We, librarians and end users, are overwhelmed by a flood of so-called upgrades,...
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The #TwitJC Twitter Journal Club, a New Initiative on Twitter. Some Initial...
There is a new initiative on Twitter: The Twitter Journal Club. It is initiated by Fi Douglas (@fidouglas) a medical student at Cambridge, and Natalie Silvey (@silv24) a junior doctor in the West...
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HOT TOPIC: Does Soy Relieve Hot Flashes?
The theme of the Upcoming Grand Rounds held at June 21th (1st day of the Summer) at Shrink Rap is “hot”. A bit far-fetched, but aah you know….shrinks“. Of course they hope assume that we will express...
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RIP Statistician Paul Meier. Proponent not Father of the RCT.
This headline in Boing Boing caught my eye today: RIP Paul Meier, father of the randomized trial Not surprisingly, I knew that Paul Meier (with Kaplan) introduced the Kaplan-Meier estimator (1958), a...
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#FollowFriday #FF @DrJenGunter: EBM Sex Health Expert Wielding the Lasso of...
If you’re on Twitter you probably seen the #FF or #FollowFriday phenomenon. FollowFriday is a way to recommend people on Twitter to others. For at least 2 reasons: to acknowledge your favorite tweople...
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PubMed’s Higher Sensitivity than OVID MEDLINE… & other Published Clichés.
Is it just me, or are biomedical papers about searching for a systematic review often of low quality or just too damn obvious? I’m seldom excited about papers dealing with optimal search strategies or...
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Evidence Based Point of Care Summaries [1] No “Best” Among the Bests?
For many of today’s busy practicing clinicians, keeping up with the enormous and ever growing amount of medical information, poses substantial challenges [6]. Its impractical to do a PubMed search to...
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Evidence Based Point of Care Summaries [2] More Uptodate with Dynamed.
This post is part of a short series about Evidence Based Point of Care Summaries or POCs. In this series I will review 3 recent papers that objectively compare a selection of POCs. In the previous post...
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Things to Keep in Mind when Searching OVID MEDLINE instead of PubMed
When I search extensively for systematic reviews I prefer OVID MEDLINE to PubMed for several reasons. Among them, it is easier to build a systematic search in OVID, the search history has a more...
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Experience versus Evidence [1]. Opioid Therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis Pain.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic auto-immune disease, which causes inflammation of the joints that eventually leads to progressive joint destruction and deformity. Patients have swollen, stiff...
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Can Guidelines Harm Patients?
Recently I saw an intriguing “personal view” in the BMJ written by Grant Hutchison entitled: “Can Guidelines Harm Patients Too?” Hutchison is a consultant anesthetist with -as he calls it- chronic...
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The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it.
Paul Glasziou, GP and professor in Evidence Based Medicine, co-authored a new article in the BMJ [1]. Similar to another paper [2] I discussed before [3] this paper deals with the difficulty for...
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Friday Foolery #51 Statistically Funny
Epidemiologists, people working in the EBM field and, above all, statisticians are said to have no sense of humor.* Hilda Bastian is a clear exception to this rule. I met Hilda a few years ago at a...
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Friday Foolery #53 : Variations on the Cochrane Logo & Farewell from the...
Two weeks ago the annual Cochrane Colloquium was held in Auckland, New Zealand. Unfortunately I wasn’t there, but I followed the tweets (see Storify for a selection). And for a more in depth coverage:...
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No, Google Scholar Shouldn’t be Used Alone for Systematic Review Searching
Several papers have addressed the usefulness of Google Scholar as a source for systematic review searching. Unfortunately the quality of those papers is often well below the mark. In 2010 I already [1]...
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Between the Lines. Finding the Truth in Medical Literature [Book Review]
In the 1970s a study was conducted among 60 physicians and physicians-in-training. They had to solve a simple problem: “If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1/1000 has a false positive...
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