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How to hone your information management skills

Mark Berendsen, MLIS
Galter Health Sciences Library
Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recognizes that managing the vast amount of information available for making treatment decisions and conducting research is one of many challenges facing practicing physicians in the information age. The ACGME states that residents must be able to do the following:

  • Locate, appraise, and assimilate evidence from scientific studies related to their patients’ health problems

  • Apply knowledge of study designs and statistical methods to the appraisal of clinical studies and other information on diagnostic and therapeutic effectiveness

  • Use information technology to manage information, access online medical information, and support their own education1

This article offers tools to answer these vexing questions:

  • How do you separate the reliable information from the not-so reliable information?

  • How do you store the useful information you retrieved so you can quickly find it when you need it?

  • How do you stay informed of new developments within your discipline and keep up to date with the most current literature?

A list of resources that will aid you in finding, evaluating, and managing information more efficiently follows. In the process, you will save valuable time. Many of these resources are freely available over the Internet, but some require a license agreement or subscription to access content. If in doubt, check with your institution's library to see if you have access to a specific resource.

Users' guides to the surgical literature
Searching for relevant literature and evaluating studies can be frustrating and time consuming. Thankfully, there are resources available to assist you. Between 2001 and 2005, the Canadian Journal of Surgery published a series titled “Users' guides to the surgical literature.” These full-text articles are freely available over the Internet.

Mihailovic A, Bell CM, Urbach DR. Users' guide to the surgical literature. Case-control studies in surgical journals. Can J Surg. 2005 Apr;48(2):148-51.

Birch DW, Goldsmith CH, Tandan V; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature. Self-audit and practice appraisal for surgeons. Can J Surg. 2005 Feb;48(1):57-62.

Thoma A, Farrokhyar F, Bhandari M, Tandan V; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature. How to assess a randomized controlled trial in surgery. Can J Surg. 2004 Jun;47(3):200-8.

Bhandari M, Devereaux PJ, Montori V, Cina C, Tandan V, Guyatt GH; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature: how to use a systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Can J Surg. 2004 Feb;47(1):60-7.

Birch DW, Eady A, Robertson D, De Pauw S, Tandan V; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature: how to perform a literature search. Can J Surg. 2003 Apr;46(2):136-41. Erratum in: Can J Surg. 2003 Aug 15;46(4):250.

Hong D, Tandan VR, Goldsmith CH, Simunovic M; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature: how to use an article reporting population-based volume-outcome relationships in surgery. Can J Surg. 2002 Apr;45(2):109-15.

Thoma A, Sprague S, Tandan V; Evidence-Based Surgery Working Group. Users' guide to the surgical literature: how to use an article on economic analysis. Can J Surg. 2001 Oct;44(5): 347-54.

You may use the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed service to search for the users’ guides.

Locate tools for critical appraisal
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) at Oxford University offers several EBM tools, including worksheets for evaluating several different types of studies and a CATmaker, which is a program you can download to create your own critically appraised topics. The EBM Tool Kit from the University of Alberta offers a similar set of useful worksheets. One of these two sites should provide the tools you need to aid in the critical appraisal of research studies.

Find out who is citing your research
You can use Web of Science® to keep up to date on who is citing your work or the work of others. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Web of Science® and register for a personal account.

  2. Sign in to Web of Science® and run your search.

  3. From the list of results, click on the title of the article to view the full record.

  4. From the full article record, click on the times cited link to view articles that have already cited your article or click on “Create Citation Alert” to automatically receive an e-mail alert every time the article is cited in the future.

Web of Science® and ISI Web of Knowledge is a suite of databases and analytical tools from Thomson Scientific. Check with the library at your institution to see if you have access to Web of Science®.

Read new article abstracts in your inbox
You can keep up to date on specific topics by creating an automated PubMed update, which will e-mail you when new articles are added to PubMed that conform to your search parameters. Constructing a search that retrieves relevant articles is the most important step is this process. To create an automated PubMed update, do the following:

  1. Create a My National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) account.

  2. Sign in to My NCBI.

  3. Run your search in PubMed.

  4. Click “Save Search.”

  5. Choose “Yes” when asked, "Would you like to receive e-mail updates of new search results?"

  6. Specify the frequency, format, and maximum number of citations you would like to receive per alert.

For more detailed information about these and additional services for keeping up to date on particular subjects, please see the Galter Health Sciences Library Current Awareness Services Guide.

Keep track of your article references using PubMed
With your My NCBI account you can save collections of relevant article citations for later reference. To create collections using your My NCBI account, follow these instructions:

  1. Sign in to My NCBI.
  2. Run your search in PubMed.
  3. Place a check mark in the box next to each reference you wish to save.
  4. From the "Send To" pull-down menu, choose Clipboard.
  5. Click on the Clipboard tab.
  6. From the "Send To" pull-down menu, choose My NCBI Collections.
Name your collection.

Keep track of your article references using reference management software
There are several reference management programs that enable you to save a database of arti- cle references, quickly insert those references into a word processing document, and create a bibliography or works-cited list with the click of a button. EndNote, Reference Manager, Procite, and RefWorks are a few available programs. Check with your institution to see if they offer free or discounted access to one of these products. To ensure that you can easily share references with your colleagues, check to see which reference management programs they are using.

Where to publish your research: find journal impact factors
If you haven't already decided where to submit your work for publication, you may want to take a look at the impact factor of journals in your discipline. The journal impact factor is the average number of times articles published in the past two years have been cited in the current year. An impact factor of 5.0 means that, on average, articles from the specific journal have been cited five times. Journal impact factors and many other journal metrics are available through Journal Citation Reports, which is part of the Web of Science® and ISI Web of Knowledge suite of databases and analytical tools. Check with the library at your institution to see if you have access to Web of Science®.

Additional help is available from your library
It's always a good idea to check with the medical library at your institution to find out which resources and information management tools are available in your discipline. Medical librarians have professional training in searching the biomedical literature and can answer quick reference questions or help with more in-depth literature searching.

1. ACGME Outcome Project

 

 

Online October 5, 2007
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