Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
trapping Government- Generated Medical and scientific information
credibility is a very real issue when it comes to researching scientiic and medical information
online. These are two areas in which, perhaps more than other topic areas, you don't want to
ind yourself searching among noncredible or undocumented information.
for that reason, you really need to know about pubmed and science.gov, two governmental
Web sites that provide access to scientiic and medical research. These are major, busy, well-
known sites, and as such have spawned several third-party tools that you may ind useful.
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Science.gov offers both a searchable subject index of science-related government sites and
the full-text information of over 45 million Web pages. Be sure to check out its advanced
search page. You can narrow your search both by science topic and by date range. science.
gov also offers alerts. once registered (it requires only an e-mail address, user name, and
password), you can run searches and then save the searches as alerts. alas, search results
are only sent out once a week, on Wednesdays.
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PubMed (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) is a service of the U.s. national Library of
medicine and provides access to over 50 million citations for life science journals going
back to the 1950s. You can do searches from this site, and pubmed does offer the ability
to save searches, but in my experience pubmed can be pretty overwhelming for someone
with little medical background.
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When i need to search pubmed, i ind ClusterMed, at clustermed.info/, very useful. it takes
your search results and “clusters” them (remember the sidebar on clustering earlier in the
chapter?) into topics more easily understood by the non-medical professional. a search
for “autism,” for example, is clustered into topics including face processing, autism and
asperger's syndrome, and children with autism spectrum disorders. clustermed does have
a subscription component, but you can also use a free version that's limited to 100 results
at a time. make those queries speciic!
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if you want to use pubmed for rss feeds, i encourage you to try Hubmed, at hubmed.org/.
hubmed is an alternative (friendlier) interface to pubmed that also lets you easily generate
rss feeds. it makes pubmed a lot easier to use, especially if you're not a medical professional
who might miss some of pubmed's power functions.
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