Health Library News

A message from nhse regarding the impact of the US gov shutdown on pubmed and medline: -------------- If you have visited a US government funded website in the past few days, you may have noticed a warning like this: "Because of a lapse in government funding, the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted. The NIH Clinical Center (the research hospital of NIH) is open. For more details about its operating status, please visit cc.nih.gov . Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at opm.gov ." What does this mean for NHS users? If you subscribe to auto-alerts from PubMed or Medline (from either of our commercial suppliers, Ovid or EBSCO), you may notice that you don’t receive any new records for a couple of weeks. If the shut-down lasts for longer than anticipated, cons...

This is an interesting blog where topic-specific literature search strategies are shared. The suggested searches give you Mesh headings as well as possible free-text phrases related to a specific topic the author is investigating. The tag cloud gives you an indication of the type of topics covered. The searches are pretty detailed and comprehensive. It is an interesting place to look if you are struggling to think of your own search terms. screen-shot of a selected pubmed search strategy

Pubmed is a freely available, online, searchable, bibliographic database, which includes data from Medline. You can use it to complement and supplement your literature searching. You use the main text box to enter your simple free-text search terms or the more sophisticated advanced search options to combine searches and apply limits. The results list will often include links to freely available article pdfs, though you will need to check on our journal lists for access to most journal titles. The search results list can be filtered, emailed or exported. If you sign-up and create a free login you can also save your searches and set up alerts. Pubmed also has a citation matcher which is really useful when you are trying to track-down a reference where you have only part of the details. There are a range of tutorials to help you to get to grips with Pubmed.

Edit: These problems have now been resolved and there should be full access to Medline. A number of problems have been reported this morning in relation to the NHS Search 2.0 databases. The following issues have been reported to NHS Evidence and are under investigation: * No access to Medline * Embase slow to display results or timing out * Problems re-running a search on a different database * De-duplication not returning appropriate results If you encounter any problems, please take a screen shot (press Prt Scrn button and paste into a word document) and email to s.w.smith@lib.keele.ac.uk (tel: 01782 556581). It is useful to know if you are at work or home, what database you were in when the error occurred and what were the preceeding search steps. If the problem persist the alternate solutions are * Request a literature search from the library. * Use the Library IT Suite to search the Ebsco Databases (available through Keele walk-in access) * Use PubMed search (t...

PubMed is currently trialling a new interface . Further information on the redesign can be accessed here . Please note that you can view which articles can be accessed either through your NHS Athens account or are available in the Health Libray, by using the special link available on the Health Library website .

MireSoft has recently released a new free referencing tool for PubMed called Cite Smart . Cite Smart allows you to build your own reference library from PubMed, search PubMed direct from your Word document and will insert references as appropriate. To find out more, or to download Cite Smart, click here .