Customer Reviews

Field Guide to Medline: Making Searching Simple

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Written by the lead Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Stanford University School of Medicine's Lane Medical Library, the main purpose of this pocket guide is to help medical and related professionals construct and conduct faster, easier and more effective MEDLINE searches. It also helps you decide when it's more appropriate to use the free PubMed interface for MEDLINE or Ovid, a commercial (fee-based) alternative, in case you have access to both or wonder whether it's worth subscribing to Ovid.

MEDLINE archives change daily and PubMed services change almost weekly, yet it's been four years since the last guide to MEDLINE was published, and there have been only two books before this one that focused solely on MEDLINE and were intended for professionals, rather than consumers. If you choose only one guide, this is the one to get.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of medical bibliographic databases and tips for when to use which ones. Chapter 2 is an orientation to MEDLINE's structure and to basic search strategies, as well as an intro to the pros and cons of PubMed (free) vs. Ovid (fee). Stave goes into both in considerable depth in separate chapters devoted to each service. The two appendices cover Ovid's evidence-based medicine reviews collection (Cochrane's Database of Systematic Reviews, for instance) and other databases, such as ClinicalTrials.gov and LOCATORplus. There's a five-page glossary at the end, too, so you'll know what terms such as "check tags" and "explode" mean in this context.

HIGHLIGHTS:

This smallish book is filled with full-color screenshots, often two or three to a page, which is invaluable in helping the reader understand the explanations in the narrative text. The author gives detailed instructions for designing search strategies and other approaches to try if your first attempts don't produce the results you need. The effect is like looking over the author's shoulder while he patiently explains things to you, step by step.

The core sections on PubMed and Ovid are each broken down into three subsections:

* Overview, Screens, and Tools;
* Searching (by single citation, author or using various methods for topics); and
* Post-Search Data Management.

The data management section covers downloading and saving your search results, using commercial citation management software, and ordering full-text articles when they're not available free. The orientation to MEDLINE's relatively new Cubby service, alone, will make your searches less frustrating and time-consuming almost instantly. And did you know that, contrary to what many supposed experts say, you can search online for articles published pre-MEDLINE, from 1985-1965? (See LOCATORplus.)

This is a book you need to keep handy while you're working on becoming more of a whiz at online research, so it's designed to tuck into a lab or suit coat pocket (about 8 in. H x 4.5 in. W). It's basically a lucid, logical tutorial. If you invest the time to go through each of the five or so search strategies included in both the PubMed and Ovid sections, you will not only get better results, but you will surely save countless hours ever after.

LIMITATIONS:

Overall, this book is a gem. The only serious drawback is that the narrative text is in 8-point type, which makes it extremely difficult to read if you're over 40 (or younger, but tired). It would also be far easier to use in spiral-bound rather than perfect-bound format. If the publisher reprints it, let's hope they ditch the pocket-sized guide idea and whatever motivation to save printing costs that influenced the decision of the design for this first edition and make readability and usability higher priorities.

SUMMARY:

The Field Guide to MEDLINE is a clear, comprehensive and simple but not simplistic guide. It's an essential how-to and reference book for anyone who needs to search medical literature online, either frequently or occasionally.

This book is an excellent resource tool for searching Medline,
learning more about the intricacies of literature searches, or improving/enhancing skills. This text is incredibly comprehensive and thorough and is a must have for every information professional. Simple to understand, I would also recommend this book to any library user eager to acquire skills needed to run the perfect Medline search. Two thumbs up! We have two copies of this important book in our medical library and both are used continuously.

I was very disappointed when this book first arrived. The book is VERY small, maybe 4 inches by 6 inches and not as deep as an ink pen. I changed my mind about this book as I started to read it, though. I found it very useful, straight-forward, and easy to understand. It was great to quickly refresh my memory on Medline after not using it for a few years. The full color pictures are very nice, but I'm afraid that's what drove the price of this book up. It seems very expensive for the size of the book and amount of content you receive. Was it worth the money? For me, since my new job involves an extensive amount of literature searches, yes it was worth the price. But I think this same information could have been presented in a simple ten page handout.