Nurses: do you need a quick brush up on your PubMed skills? A new PubMed tutorial, developed specifically for nurses, is now available from the National Library of Medicine. Created in consultation with nurses and nursing librarians from around the United States, this series of five videos can be watched in less than 30 minutes and includes several interactive exercises to reinforce learning of basic concepts. The tutorial begins with a brief description of the contents of PubMed, and shows how to use a PICO (patient–intervention–comparison–outcome) question to select search terms. Two videos then cover conducting a simple search in PubMed, examining search details (including PubMed’s mapping of search terms to Medical Subject Headings), narrowing search results by applying publication date or age limits, and limiting search results to articles appearing in nursing journals. Also covered is the use of clinical queries—search strings available in PubMed that limit search results to specific clinical study categories (therapy, etiology, diagnosis, prognosis, clinical guidelines, and systematic reviews). A final video explains how to create a My NCBI account, which can be used to store both PubMed searches and the results of those searches.
After you’ve finished the tutorial, use the HSLS link to PubMed (available in the Quick Links box on the HSLS home page) to start searching. This ensures that the HSLS
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will be activated in PubMed. Happy searching! |
~Mary Lou Klem