Medline: A Guide to Effective Searching [Paperback]

MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching is a wonderful tool to aid almost all of us who use MEDLINE. The book clearly meets its intent, "the promotion of better searches and, hence, better application of what is known." The 1997 decision by the Library of Medicine to abandon its fee structure for the World Wide Web has permitted much greater access and thus makes this guide so much more valuable. While the entire monograph has great merit, I think I found the final chapter, "Framing Questions," the most useful. The guide is not only helpful, but it is very well written and enormously practical. I recommend it highly.

...a very well-written and intelligent guide not only to MEDLINE but also the broader issues of searching bibliographic databases. Anyone interested in improving their search skills and making the fullest use of MEDLINE will benefit from reading this book.

...a clear and comprehensive presentation of the power of MEDLINE. This book will quickly improve the MEDLINE use of any health care professional.

An old New Yorker cartoon was captioned, "I predict a great future for complexity." It is a gift beyond our understanding that people have worked for the past 135 years to perfect a system to organize the complexity of the medical literature. But that organization is of full benefit only if we learn how to use it. Katcher has provided a guide of great value that gives us an understanding of how the system works and how to achieve access to 9 million articles in a logical fashion. This is the latest gift for which "searchers after truth" can be grateful.

Even in this new age of information, no information is more important to the human condition than that which reveals new insights on health and health prospects. Accordingly, no challenge is more compelling than ensuring that participants have timely and efficient access to the best available research findings as they seek to move the boundaries for the field. This guide to MEDLINE and other bibliographic databases provides an important boost to the efficiency of the search endeavor.

This concise and clearly written book will make your MEDLINE searches more productive. Any health professional will benefit from reading this book, which explains the basics of formulating searches, shows how to put the main indexing elements in MEDLINE to best use, illustrates the importance of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), provides guidance on framing questions, and backs everything up with practical examples. Includes a glossary of all MeSH used in the book and two appendices.

Brian S. Katcher, Pharm.D., is the author of Prescription Drugs: An Indispensable Guide for People Over 50 and was one of the founding editors of Applied Therapeutics: The Clinical Use of Drugs, a textbook used in training clinical pharmacists. Dr. Katcher is the Public Health Pharmacist for the Community Health Promotion & Disease Prevention Branch of the San Francisco Department of Public Health and Associate Clinical Professor of Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco.

His main work is in developing community-based, environmentally-focused primary prevention activities. Toward that end, he is interested in assessments of population health that will be useful to communities. He is a member of the San Francisco Burden of Disease & Injury Work Group, which is pioneering the first municipal application of the Harvard/WHO Global Burden of Disease approach toward assessments of population health. This group has recently completed an analysis of premature mortality in San Francisco and is currently working on a complementary assessment of morbidity.

His interest in promoting the most effective use of MEDLINE supports a larger vision of evidence-based health policy and practice.