Drug Information Journal - March 2009 - (Page 115) MEDICAL INFORMATION 115 Paolo Coccia, BSc Information Specialist, Documentation and Library Services, Ipsen S.p.A., Milano, Italy Gabriella Gabutti, MA Information Specialist, Scientific Direction Library, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo Hospital, Pavia, Italy Francesca Gualtieri, MA Information Specialist, Scientific Information and Library Services, Rottapharm Madaus, Monza, Milano, Italy Maria Letizia Sora, MA Librarian, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Parma, Parma, Italy Key Words PubMed third-party tools; Information storage and retrieval; Performance evaluation; Information literacy; Aggregators Correspondence Address Paolo Coccia, BSc, Information Specialist, Documentation and Library Services, Ipsen S.p.A., Via A. Figino 16, 20156 Milano, Italy (email: paolo.coccia@ipsen.com). The Drug Information Association is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The Drug Information Association designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)TM. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. If you would like to receive a statement of credit, you must review the article, and complete the posttest and evaluation included on the DIA website. Participants must receive a passing score of 80% or better on the posttest in order to receive a statement of credit. To access the posttest and evaluation, please visit the DIA website at www.diahome.org, select Educational Offerings, and then select Continuing Education from the drop-down menu, and the My Transcript link. This will take you to the My Transcript page where you will be prompted to sign in using your DIA username and password. Once signed in, you may select the article “New Web Tools to Improve PubMed Searches for the Biomedical Community.” You will be prompted to complete the posttest and evaluation. Upon successful completion of the posttest, you will be able to download your statement of credit. If you are not a DIA customer, please contact the DIA office at mytranscript@diahome.org for a registration form. There is no fee to receive your statement of credit. New Web Tools to Improve PubMed Searches for the Biomedical Community Nowadays, numerous tools, search engines, and medical aggregators are available on the Internet, but the biomedical community is still having difficulty accessing and retrieving information effectively. The aim of this survey was to analyze and evaluate PubMed third-party tools for optimizing biomedical information retrieval. Among the newest tools, the most respectful and close to PubMed configuration and structure were taken into consideration. A natural-language standard query, thrombocytopenia AND human AND hepatitis, was performed on five selected and classified PubMed third-party tools: SLIM, Anne O’Tate, Vivisimo or ClusterMed, Hubmed, and PubFocus. The results were evaluated according to the following criteria: accessibility, user friendliness, and answer timeliness. Three tools showed good results (three-star score), two were excellent (five-star score), and one was poor (two-star score). The syntactic and semantic correctness of the search strategies set and the proper use of the PubMed MeSH Terms cannot be ignored in biomedical searches using MEDLINE/PubMed. C O N T I N U I N G E D U C A T I O N Learning Objectives Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to: • Identify web tools to optimize medical query answers on Web 2.0 • Improve the search competencies optimizing the information search and retrieval: time saving and high-quality performance • Review the most popular third-party tools available on the web: analysis of accessibility, friendly use • Offer different retrieval advances on the customer skills identifying web tools that optimize medical query answers on the web Target Audience This article is informative for medical doctors working in the pharmaceutical industry, scientific researchers, physicians and health operators, preclinical and clinical pharmacologists, health librarians, and scientific information specialists. INTRODUCTION The amount of biomedical information available on the Internet is increasing at a startling rate, making searching and retrieving highquality essential documentation extremely difficult (1). Numerous tools, web search engines, and medical aggregators are now available, but the biomedical community is still having difficulty accessing and retrieving information effectively. PubMed, the world’s best-known, most up-todate, and most authoritative biomedical literature database, is produced by the National Li- Release Date: March 1, 2009 Expiration Date: March 31, 2010 Estimated time to complete the activity: 1 hour Disclosure It is Drug Information Association policy that all faculty participating in continuing education activities must disclose to the program audience (1) any real or apparent conflict(s) of interest related to the content of their presentation and (2) discussion of unlabeled or unapproved uses of drugs or medical devices. Specific areas to be considered in this disclosure include the following: grants/research support, consultancy relationships, speakers’ bureau participation, significant equity (stock) positions, and sources of honoraria. Paolo Coccia has disclosed that he has no financial relationships to disclose. Gabriella Gabutti, Francesca Gualtieri, and Maria Letizia Sora report no relationships to disclose. Drug Information Journal, Vol. 43, pp. 115–122, 2009 • 0092-8615/2009 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2009 Drug Information Association, Inc. Submitted for publication: November 7, 2007 Accepted for publication: September 9, 2008 http://www.diahome.org
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