Hi Everyone.

Okay, I feel really stupid here. HOW DO YOU WORK PUBMED? I think this is really a question for fmichael. I am not a total moron, but not a computer wizard either...you can laugh at me if you want. We all need a little humor...

Kim

Oh I see they have a tutorial here-
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmedtutorial/


but I usually just do a search of what I am looking for in their search box in the top - RSD or whatever and hit go- then explore more from there.
here is RSD -
http://vsearch.nlm.nih.gov/vivisimo/...m-main-website

hope the link works for you.

Kim -

Jo's right, but you have to bear in mind that it's written for doctors, so that it expects search requests in professional terms. You may have to Google/Wiki the drug, condition, etc., until you hit the particular term. When in doubt, run any candidate term through the medical dictionary at the top of the NT page.

Secondly, be prepared for searching bliss. Absolutely no connector terms required. Because it's been too long since I've had open Lexis access, I would say have to say that, in my experience, it's the first professional search engine to use modern (non-Boolean) search technology - although it's available for so called "advance searches."

But the stuff's been around for a while. "Competitive technology assessment. Strategic patent clusters obtained with non-boolean logic." New applications of the GET command, Henri Dou, Parina Hassanaly, Luc Quoniam and Albert La Tela, World Patent Information Volume 12, Issue 4, 1990, Pages 222-229, too short an abstract and a pretty in-your-face "purchase here" tag http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retri...7221909090057R

That said, be sure to check for the free articles that will pop up on many PubMed searches. Your search result is portrayed (in the default setting) as a list of articles from medical journals and at times a series of monographs, ranked in order of probability of conforming to your search request. Each number entry will give you the title, authors, publisher and date of a possible fit. Open it and you're at the abstract. But before you go to the individual article, note that at the upper left of the list of articles page, you can filter your results for "all," "review," or "free full text." The last one being what you want to hear. Otherwise, you have to buy or borrow a copy to read the full piece. And PubMed is clever too: search results can't be linked to where they reside only as temporary pages in PubMed.

Inside the abstract, you can in turn click on "see all related articles" to generate a second list - best done as a tab - and I've found that it's typically in this second list, based on a pertinent article, is generally where you can most find those articles your interested in, beginning in the nineties for the most part.

Mike

ps Forgot the best source for bringing yourself up to date on current tremds on research and much of the applicable medical vocabulary: the Research and Clinical Article page of the RSDSA http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...ive/index.html Not only are these some of the best articles in any number of topics, but anything there is free for non-commercial use, even when the same piece isn't otherwise freely available.

Okay... I will try to digest this. Thank you fmichael. And, thank you all for posting!

If you search any medications, use the generic name for them.

Good choice of keywords gives the best hits. You might have to put "human"in some because many animal/food processing papers exist on there. So if a term does not bring up much, try an alternate way of searching it. Authors can be searched Last name first then initials no punctuation.

Many PubMed papers do pop up on Google now, too.

Some abbreviations like RSD don't bring all papers you are searching for. And some abbreviations can stand for more than one thing. Example GLA, or ALA, can bring up confusing results.
SAMe doesn't get what one needs either. Must use s-adenosylmethionine for that search.

I lately also do Wiki searches. Sometimes there are clues there that you can then further explore on PubMed. Wiki has become better and more reliable lately IMO. I never used to use it as much as I do now.

You bring up some good points. Thank you. While not medical-related, I do some research , query writing and data analysis as part of my job. Never be satisfied with the first search you do.

Say you looking for song titles by the Beatles. Because of typos and other errors, you may also want to look at beatles (lower case “b”) or BEETLES, or Beetles, or beetles, or betles, and so on. Some search engines are powerful enough to include all of those different spelling possibilities, but you may catch some additional data on your own if you use your imagination and really look around.

The main database I work with has rules that say a name is supposed to be entered: Truman Harry S – last name first, with no comma and no period for the middle initial. But I may never find it if that is all I look for and someone mistakenly put it in as Harry S. Truman or even Truman, Harry S.

Good luck with your research.

Mike