Module 2

You used an electronic index, a guideline index and a web search engine to retrieve informaton relevant to your clincal problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/not useful for your information retrieval task, and why? Identify some alternative strategies for retrieving relevant informaton - would context relevant information retrieval be useful?

I found PubMed to be a fairly easy program to navigate. It is probably due to the fact that I have used the basics of it in the past but the tutorial we watched was very informative and I was able to do much more to aid my citation search. It was almost self explanatory once I knew what Limits, subheadings, boolean terms and MeSH were. PubMed was certainly useful for my retrieval task. I found the Ntional Guideline Clearinghouse web site to be very busy and confusing. It was complicated compared to PubMed. There were options to aid in my search but not as easy to understand and it seemed as though there were not as many options, more lists as such to chose from. I used Google search and typed in 'diabetes and pregnancy and metformin' and got 20,600,000 hits. Most of these were information sites such as American Diabetes Association, March of Dimes, CDC and pharmacutical sites. There were a few articles but very few RCT or clincial reviews or meta analysis or journal articles. It would take hours to sift through all those sites to find anything that was evidence based and usable for research. I have used Google Scholar before and found more articles that were relevant to a research project but many of them were for a fee.