Searching The Medical Literature: I regularly search and use medical literature. A couple of tips. First, many public or state libraries will provide single copies or pdf. files if you give them the citation. This policy probably varies greatly with budget limitations and locale, but it is worth inquiring. Local hospital libraries will often accommodate reasonable patient requests for copies or help you with your search. Large university teaching hospital medical libraries are also potential resources. You can also “google” the article authors to see if anyone has posted the article you want on the net. Second, a rich resource is the Pub Med system maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Abstracts and sometimes whole articles are available on-line through this resource. 1. Go to:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed It offers you the choice of searching by topic, author, or journal. Entering the search terms “hip resurfacing” yielded 222 articles, for example. If you know what article or authors you want, you enter the last name and initials of one or two authors in this format: smith jc, jones tw Then hit the “GO” button and the program will list all the articles written by those authors. 2. After entering your search terms or author names and hitting the “GO” button, you will receive a list of articles. In the tabbed gray area at the top of the list will be the total number of articles retrieved, in this case, 222. Above your list of articles are four drop-down menu boxes. a. The first is “Display.” Hit the drop down arrow and pick “Abstract.” Peer reviewed journals require the author(s) to summarize their research objective, methods, and key findings in 300 or so words. This allows the reader to quickly scan to see if the article is relevant for their purposes. Editorials or commentaries don’t have abstracts. b. In the “Show” box, you have a couple of options. If you want to work your way through the list in sections (say 50 articles at a time), you must select the number corresponding to how many articles you want to scan at a time. The program will display 50 articles in each section. This is important because when you are ready to send your selected articles to text (see d. and #4)-you will have to process each section separately. This is a confusing feature of the Pub Med program. The easy out is to select the number that most closely matches the total. c. In the “Sort by” box, I usually select “Pub Date.” d. Don’t do anything with “Send TO” now. 3. Now as you go through the listed articles, there will be a box next to each article–IF YOU WANT TO PRINT THE ABSTRACT OR CITATION AFTER YOU’VE SCANNED THE ARTICLES ON THE LIST–CHECK THAT BOX. Next to each citation is an icon that looks like a page-if it has three lines across running half way on the page-the article has an abstract. 4. After you’ve finished reviewing one section or the entire list of articles, go back to the “Send To” box, and select “Text” if you want to print the abstracts/citations of your selected articles. A new plain text list will come up that should contain your selected citations/abstracts. You can save the list to your files (“Save Page” in your browser’s file menu, or print it, using your browser printing feature. Sometimes mysterious glitches occur, so another option is to select the text and paste it into a Word file or whatever word processing program you use, and then print it. A tip: Most abstracts will fit nicely on 5×8″ index cards-so if you want to sort the material on cards, it’s a handy way of organizing the material. Good Hunting… Sharon (Gross, Rt. Biomet 8/24/06) Bandon, OR