Library Announcements
Trial of New Online Database
PsycEXTRA
from the American Psychological Association
supplements PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES with literature from outside
the peer-reviewed relm: newsletters, magazines, newspapers,
technical and annual reports, government reports, consumer
brochures, etc. The trial goes to October 1, 2004.
Database Changes
Two resources which the University Library formerly licensed from Ovid
are now being purchased from other vendors.
This issue of the Medical Library e-newsletter announces three new PubMed interactive tutorials
on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and a tutorial that walks you through basic PubMed screens.
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s pride and joy.
For FSU faculty, students and staff, it links MEDLINE searches to full articles available at FSU,
and it includes a feature called the “related articles” link which takes the user to similar articles.
The FSU College of Medicine delivers MEDLINE via OVID, MD Consult and PubMed,
but PubMed provides MEDLINE free.
This means physicians who do not have access to MEDLINE through OVID or MD Consult,
still have a way to access it for free.
Patients, families of patients and anyone else interested in medical literature use PubMed.
Figure 1. PubMed Home Page.
Approximately 60 million searches are conducted monthly via PubMed and it is estimated
that one-third of these searches are made by consumers.
Please take a few minutes to get familiar with this valuable resource.
Figure 2. PubMed Tutorial Page.
This is the tutorial screen.
You may take this tutorial at your own pace and select all or some of the portions
via the table of contents to the left.
Figure 3. MeSH Tutorials.
This is the screen noting the animated MeSH tutorials.
Each tutorial is very brief (2-3 minutes) and very well constructed.
At the present time, you can get to this screen by clicking on the “MeSH database” link
on the left side of the main PubMed page.
At some time in the future, you may be able to link directly to this via the tutorial,
but for now, enter via the PubMed homepage.
Featured PDA Resource -- Clinical Calculators
Several PDA products currently contain clinical calculators that can be used
as a decision support tool and to help speed up the processing and accuracy of clinical data.
These have been popular medical uses for PDAs since they were introduced.
Many Palm users are familiar with MedMath, which is free.
As our students and faculty are using PocketPCs,
we have advocated that users download and install Archimedes from Skyscape,
which contains clinical calculators. (Figures 1-3)
Figure 1.
Specific calculators can be selected by formula as shown in Figure 1,
Figure 2.
. . . or by category or type as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 3.
The conversions are very handy for translating between metric and the English measures.
Here is a simple unit converter for converting pounds to kilograms. (Figure 3)
There are also a number of calculators in InfoRetriever.
These can be found in all versions of InfoRetriever: web, desktop and PDA. (Figures 4-5)
Figure 4.
They can be found by selecting under Type of Search: Clinical rules and calculators.
They are then organized by system.
Click on the plus sign to expand the topic areas and see the list of calculators and clinical prediction tools.
(Figure 4)
Figure 5.
One example of a handy calculator under Obstetrics is the Pregnancy Wheel to calculate due date.
See the list of calculators at left. (Figure 5)
