PubMed is probably the best search database online to find new information on drug therapy. It is available via the NCBI Entrez retrieval system and a product of the National Institute of Health (NIH). PubMed utilizes MEDLINE's biomedical database which contains citations for journal articles that date from 1950-the present. MEDLINE resources are indexed by the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database which is a convenient way to search for certain topics relating to clinical practice.
PubMed contains more than just the MEDLINE database. Other resources available via PubMed include: Accessed on 11/20/2007 (http://www.nlm.nih.gov.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html)
* In-process citations which provide a record for an article before it is indexed with MeSH and added to MEDLINE or converted to out-of-scope status.
* Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing (when supplied electronically by the publisher).
* Some OLDMEDLINE citations that have not yet been updated with current vocabulary and converted to MEDLINE status.
* Citations to articles that are out-of-scope (e.g., covering plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and general chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed with MeSH for MEDLINE.
* Some life science journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral® and may not yet have been recommended for inclusion in MEDLINE although they have undergone a review by NLM, and some physics journals that were part of a prototype PubMed in the early to mid-1990's.
When looking for information regarding treatment strategies as pharmacists, PubMed should be an important component of that search. This database offers a convenient and efficient search engine to find the most up to date research information available. This is particularly important clinically when forced with difficult patients who require complex treatment strategies. The best way to find answers to these difficult questions is to find the information needed to provide direction to the treatment strategy. PubMed includes new, reliable information, and links to full text articles of many of the referenced research studies. PubMed provides a nice way to locate new information that patients no doubt will be learning and asking their pharmacist about.
2 comments:
I also like PubMed's efficient searching capabilities and the endless numbers of articles to be able to search through. This is a critical tool when practicing evidence based medicine. The one downside to using search tools such as PubMed is that you get a variety of conflicting studies in which need to be evaluated on their validity. A final decision must be made by the pharmacist from the evidence that was found and if the pharmacist isn't careful decisions can be made on weak studies.
I like the comfort that a credible primary drug information source like PubMed provides. Being a product of the National Institute of Health, you know that it is a reliable source of up-to-date and useful information. Indeeed, it does require some evaluation skills, but at least accessing the info to evaluate is not that hard because of the unique search properties offered by PubMed.
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