Task 1: navigate to the Northern Light search engine (http://www.nlsearch.com) and Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com)

Discussion

Internet Search Engines

Task 2: use a search engine to identify Internet resources which teach you how to use the Internet (including finding other search engines)

Discussion

This should be a simple search to perform - perhaps just one word. A metasearch engine such as Dogpile should ensure the broadest coverage.........Try it and see!!!

Visit a few of the Medline sites on offer and save them in your Favorites folder for use later.

Discussion

Discussion

Discussion

Task 6: Find articles on how to use Medline. Once you have done this then go to one of the sites which you identified in Task 3.

Discussion

Discussion

Discussion

Navigating on the Internet is accomplished either by typing in the address in the navigation bar (or the File/Open dialog box), or by clicking on a hypertext link. When you reach a site you can add it to the Favorites folder (Internet Explorer) or bookmark it (Netscape). This allows you to return to the site easily in the future.

These two sites were selected to demonstrate a standard search engine interface (Northern Light), as well as the hierarchical subject-tree approach (Yahoo). Yahoo is one of the most popular search sites because many people find it easier to follow hyperlinks down a subject tree rather than construct a search themselves. I certainly use both approaches when searching on the Internet, as different resources will be found with different search methods.

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Task 2: Internet Search Engines

Try "Search Engine + Guide + English"  using Northern Light or "Search Engine" using Yahoo in the 'Computers and Internet' section.

Following the hypertext links will soon find you some reasonable guides to using search engines.

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Depending on which engine you chose you might have found several hundred thousand sites! This would include companies called Medline, and research where Medline was used in a literature search. Refining the search might involve using Boolean operators - e.g. Medline AND Database or choosing a search engine which organises the search results into logical categories e.g. Northern Light or Inference Find.

Try Dogpile just entering 'Medline' as the search string. Dogpile is a metasearch engine, meaning that it sends your search string to a number of other search engines - it is interesting to note the wide differences between the results. A good strategy when using a metasearch engine is to visit the search engine site which seemed to produce the best 'hits', and refine your search there.

Medline is available, free, at many sites round the world. The underlying database (Medline) will always be the same. The difference lies in the search engine at the site which performs your search. For example, you may already have encountered the Ovid search engine at the BMA Medline Plus site. If you struggled with the interface there, then do not despair. You may find it easier to use an engine at a different site, and some sites provide superb documentation on how to perform a search - more later!.

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It is tricky to know whether a search on the Internet will be easy or difficult, until you try. To find medical websites on the Internet I favour using Northern Light as a starting point as it indexes more professional sites than other search engines. You could try just typing in 'evidence based medicine' and see what happens.

If this is not successful you could try the same search string in different search engines such as Alta Vista, Hotbot, or Infoseek, as these cover a huge number of sites, or a metasearch engine such as Dogpile or Inference Find. Alternatively, you could try a different search string such as 'evidence medicine' in the hope of obtaining some hits which you could later refine.

If you were still not successful, then using an engine with a thesaurus such as Excite would allow mapping to similar words.

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Actually this is pretty easy once you have found the ScHARR netting.html site as it contains links to other EBM sites. The Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine Links Page is also a useful resource.

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I'm sure I don't need to hold your hand by now. However, if you get stuck, then try entering 'Medline guide' in Dogpile and Northern Light. Depending on which search engines seem to be on target you can then refine your search further.

Additional material may be obtained by visiting Medline sites and downloading the local site guides, or by following links from ScHARR netting.html to EBM sites which offer help on using Medline (e.g. the Oxford CEBM). Medical librarians are experts at searching both the Internet and Medline, so another search strategy would be to find some medical library sites and find local guides and/or links to guides.

Finally, of course, you can use Medline itself to search for medical literature on using Medline. A quickie cheat is that if you already know of an article indexed in Medline (such as the Trisha Greenhalgh article in Task 7) you can use a 'query by example' technique. This is similar to the 'More like this...' facility provided by some of the Internet search engines. You have to find a Medline site that offers this facility (e.g. Pubmed). You perform a quick search that finds this article and then click on the 'Related Articles' link to find other papers which have been indexed as being of similar content. It's a bit hit-and-miss, but it can sometimes be a real timesaver.

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Finding an abstract or reference is not the same as being able to download an article. Only certain journals make their articles available on line, the BMJ and JAMA being the notable ones. The NEJM, Lancet and Annals of Internal Medicine allow you to search but not download. By now you shouldn't have much trouble finding the British Medical Journal website.

You have to go to the BMJ website, search the local database to find the article, and then download it. An article may be in *.html format (i.e. formatted as an actual web-page) or in *.pdf format (which requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader program to read it). Sites which offer information as *.pdf files will usually have a link to the Adobe website so that you can download the program - it is free. A cheaper way to obtain it may be from a computer magazine disc..

Next Task

The subject of my second Internet workshop!!

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