Learning
Objective: To make clinicians
familiar with the online repositories of Patient Education Materials
The online CME industry is thriving at sites like MD
Consult, WebMD and eMedicine.com. Here
are a couple of more academic suggestions that you might not have thought of.
·
Get on the listserv of some of your favorite journals – especially those
that you are not able to subscribe to.
Every time a new issue comes out, you’ll know all about it. It’s a very efficient way of scanning the
literature. In the workshop we’ll show
you how to subscribe.
·
Open Access Journals – there is a revolution happening in how medical
journal articles are published. Open access
journals put ALL of their content online so that anyone can use it – subscriber
or not. We’ll show you the most
successful two examples of this phenomenon and briefly discuss why you should
support it.
o www.plos.org Public Library of Science
Online
Tutorial:
1.
Overview
a.
Subscribing to e-Table of Contents Services
b.
Open Access Journals
2.
eTOC
a.
Let’s subscribe to the e-TOC service of the New England Journal of
Medicine. Each of you will subscribe
using your email address. The whole
process is reversible: you can
unsubscribe later.
b.
Go to https://secure.nejm.org/ecom/register/promo/lp1ETOC5315.aspx?promo=ONFLNR13
which is the sign up page for their email TOC service.
c.
I have emailed each of you a copy of one of their weekly emails. Click on a few of the links. Note that the links to Original Research lead to free full-text articles.
d.
Have a look at: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/26/e27?query=TOC
where there is a picture and video of reflexes in a patient with
Hypothyroidism.
e.
This service is available for most medical journals that are worth their
salt. Specific pediatric examples are:
·
BMC Pediatrics (see below): http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpediatr/alerts/
·
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine: http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/misc/online_features.dtl
·
Pediatrics: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/alerts
·
Journal of Pediatrics: http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ympd/user/alerts/savetocalert
3.
PubMed Central
a) PubMed Central
(PMC)
is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences
journal literature. Access to PMC is free and unrestricted. The idea is
to generate a repository of freely available full-text articles. The list
of journals is somewhat crimped: see http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/index.html#journals
. Search the archive on a topic of interest to you. What do you
find?
An
effective way of accessing full-text articles that are free online is to search
through PubMed and “Limit” the search to articles
that are free. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=Limits&DB=pubmed to see this option.
b) A similar effort is the journal collection at BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/ ) Here researchers have their articles peer-reviewed before being accepted for publication to the website – however, there is no print version and the copyright agreement is very magnanimous. The author has essentially agreed to:
Anyone is
free:
· to copy, distribute, and display the work;
· to make derivative works;
· to make commercial use of the work;
Under the following conditions: Attribution
· the original author must be given credit;
· for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to
others what the license terms of this work are;
· any of these conditions can be waived if the authors gives
permission.
Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the
above.
BMC Pediatrics ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpediatr/
) is their journal dedicated to Pediatrics.
PLOS (http://medicine.plosjournals.org
) is the Public Library of Science journal for medicine. They also have a highly regarded Basic
Science journal.
Clinicians
should applaud this effort at open and free access to clinical research.
What
you’ve accomplished:
·
You’ve seen a new tool that pushes medical knowledge towards you. Not everyone needs this sometimes intrusive
method of delivering knowledge but having seen the technique, you can make an
informed choice as to what to use.
·
Open access delivery of medical knowledge is a
exciting new development that will lower barriers to medical knowledge. You have seen a couple of examples of this
mechanism.
If you have questions on the subject matter,
contact Martin Pusic at: mvp19@columbia.edu .
Maria Kwok MD
Martin Pusic MD