One of the benefits of working in an academic health system are the many educational opportunities it provides. Attending lectures and grand rounds, working with smart colleagues, and having easy access to a robust medical library make it much easier for clinicians to stay up to date in their field. Even with all of these advantages, it can still be difficult to keep up. To this end, the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library has put together a few resources (some the Library subscribes to, and others are free to the general public) for you: 

New Information “Pushed” to you

We’ve written before about registering for a free MyNCBI account to have newly published literature indexed in PubMed “pushed” to you through your email account, but it’s worth mentioning again. This information can include emailing to you a journal’s table of contents for quick browsing. Click here for information on setting up a table of contents service: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/viewlet/myncbi/jourup/index.html. You can also set up automatic topic searches to be run periodically where only newly-available abstracts will be emailed to you. Click here for information on setting up an automated PubMed search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKUti5z4eA. As a member of the University of Virginia community, you have reliable access to the full-text of these abstracts.

Google Scholar is a Google tool that searches materials from selected academic and professional publishers including journals, books, and other documents, repositories, and universities. Google Scholar’s Alerts system may be of use to you because it often searches some or all of the material’s full-text as opposed to simply an abstract. It is especially helpful if your topic is multidisciplinary. One downside of this tool is that google does not specify what is included in Google Scholar making the thoroughness of your retrieval unclear. Click here for information on setting up a Google Scholar Alert https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#alerts

Essential Evidence Plus is a unique resource, subscribed to by the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library to help answer clinical questions. When you sign up for the POEMS tool (POEMs stands for Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters), you will receive via email a daily synopsis of a new research article that has been carefully filtered for relevance to patient care and evaluated for validity. Click here to sign up for POEMs and to read past summaries http://www.essentialevidenceplus.com/content/poems#accept

Information Suggested Based on Your Interests

Mendeley’s real purpose is as a reference management tool. You select articles that are relevant to you and store them in Mendeley to either read again or include in a manuscript. The interesting part about Mendeley is it provides personalized suggestions for articles to read and people to follow based on the articles you store in your Mendelay library. At this time, Mendeley is a free service. (Click here for more information about Mendeley: https://www.mendeley.com/)

F1000 Workspace is also a reference management tool with a twist. Based on the titles, abstract and authors of the articles you add to your “project”, the F1000 workspace algorithm suggests related articles to ensure you never miss an important paper. Click here for more information: https://f1000workspace.com/

Social Media is a great way to keep current. Instead of looking at cat pictures on Facebook or Twitter, choose to follow leaders in your field to learn new perspectives or hear about new research presented in real-time at professional meetings. For more information about the ways you can use Twitter for professional purposes, sign up for the Library’s class, “Twitter: Connecting Professionally in 280 Characters”.

If you have questions about any of the resources in this post, please contact Elaine Attridge, Clinical Services Liaison: Elaine@virginia.edu