Search PubMed & get the full text on your handheld

Click on this link to Pubmed for Handhelds. When it opens in your browser save it to your home sceen or to your bookmarks. It works fine on the iPhone and iPad. I didn't test it on androids or Blackberry but it should work on those platforms too. You can do a PICO search or a natural language search also knowns as google type search, or a Medline/PubMed search. It automatically invokes the familiar Unikey login screen so even if you are not connected via the Usyd wireless network you would still be able to get to the fulltext.

What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews have increasingly replaced traditional narrative reviews and expert commentaries as a way of summarising research evidence. Read more about systematic reviews in this article published in Bandolier, an independent journal about evidence-based healthcare from Oxford. (Accessed on 19/4/2010)

New EBP clinical & educational resource

The Library has organized a trial of JAMAevidence, a learning tool which provides students, educators and clinicians with the tools required for understanding and applying evidence, and making clinical decisions based on evidence. To access this resource please go to Databases on trial and scroll down to JAMAevidence. Unikey required for off-campus login.

Please try it out and let us know what you think using the Database Evaluation Form. Your comments are vital to the overall evaluation process and will have an important influence on whether the Library will subscribe to this resource.

The trial is running until the 10th August 2009.

Answering clinical questions in practice

David Tovey, newly appointed Editor in Chief of the Cochrane Library will speak at Grand Rounds at the Children's Hospital at Westmead on "Answering clinical questions in practice"


Where: Lorimer Dods Lecture Theatre, Children's Hospital at Westmead

When: Thursday 5th February 1-2pm.



David Tovey qualified in Medicine from Bristol University in the UK. He was a GP in an urban practice in South London for 14 years, and combined this with work in continuing medical education. In 2003 he left general practice and moved to the BMJ, where he became Deputy Editor, then Editor of Clinical Evidence. For the last two years he has been Editorial Director of the BMJ Evidence Centre, with responsibility for Clinical Evidence, its sister product BestTreatments aimed at the public, and the development of both the new BMJ Point of Care online product, and order entry sets in association with the Cerner Corporation. He was appointed as Editor in Chief of the Cochrane Library in late 2008, and started work for the Collaboration in January 2009.

Evidence-based Dentistry Internet Guide updated

Prompted by several enquiries of the last fortnight from fourth year Dentistry students (BDent4) undergoing their PEARLS I have updated the Evidence-based Dentistry Internet guide. You can find more information about PEARLS at The Faculty of Medicine Evidence-based Medicine program site, but basically it is an activity where students are tasked with identifying a question that has arisen out of a clinical situation, formulating an answerable question, developing a search strategy and conducting a search with the aim of identifying a quality research article. They then appraise the article and present it to their staff and their peers.

The EBD guide now contains links to relevant organisations which have information about evidence-based dentistry, links to University of Sydney databases which have EBD content, as well as several other databases and tools, and an excellent set of online guides and tutorials from both the University of Sydney and from universities in the United States.

One tutorial I recently added is from the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, on the subject of Formulating your questions using PICO. This is just one of a series of tutorials, most of which focus on using the new OvidSP interface.

TRIP Database

The latest addition to DentistryLibrary@Sydney is the TRIP Database search gadget, which can be found in the sidebar to the right of this post. The Gadget will allow readers to enter a search query and quickly come up with a range of results that will address the query, ranging from systematic reviews to articles from PubMed, which are filtered using PubMed's own Clinical Queries filters.

The aim of the TRIP Database is to "...allow health professionals to easily find the highest-quality material available on the web - to help support evidence based practice"[TRIP Database: Introduction & Background]. It just might be the ideal tool for the busy clinician who needs access to a wide range of evidence-based products in a timely manner.

The TRIP Database also contains a My TRIP homepage, which allows the user to register their own profile and set up their own auto-alerts to retrieve clinical content whenever the database is updated. This looks like it might be a good way to keep to date with evidence-based practice in individual disciplines.

Finally, TRIP has added specialist sites, one of which is Oral Health. This specialist site allows you to see the latest news, view popular searches, and have your searches filtered to include the 11 specialist oral health journals initially offered by TRIP. I've added a link to this Oral Health Specialist site to the sidebar on the right.

BDent1 - Finding the Best Evidence

This morning saw the beginning of the annual 1st year Dentistry "Finding the Best Evidence" evidence-based dentistry literature searching tutorials. As a result of this tutorial students will know how to:

• Formulate a searchable question using PICO
• Find a systematic review in Ovid's Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews & Medline
• Retrieve primary studies using the Ovid Medline Clinical Queries Filters

You can view the embedded presentation below or download it in PDF Format.

Evidentista - Pan American Centers for Evidence-based Dentistry

Another evidence-based dentistry site, Evidentista contains guidelines on how to practice evidence-based dentistry, as well as clinical Q&A's across a wide range of dental disciplines, from endodontics and oral surgery/oral medicine to orthodontics and more. Article abstracts which answer the clinical questions are drawn from Evidence-based Dentistry, and the articles themselves are downloadable via the University of Sydney Library Catalogue.

Evidentista is produced by the Pan American Centers for Evidence-based Dentistry, in collaboration with institutions such as the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry, Oxford, The Forsyth Institute, Boston, Evidence-based Dentistry Journal, and The Cochrane Library, to name a few.

It is a very good site, but would be further enhanced by having a search facility built in to ease access to the information contained in the site. It would also be good to know a bit more about the staff, such as their backgrounds, and perhaps more importantly their qualifications in evidence-based dentistry. Try it out, and let me know what you think.

EviDents search engine for evidence-based Dentistry

EviDents is a medical search engine for evidence-based dentistry developed by the Center for Evidence-based Dentistry at the Forsyth Institute. It searches PubMed using its own search interface, allowing the MeSH browser to be used in order to find the most appropriate MeSH term for the search.

Particularly nice is the way it allows you to frame your question, using PICO, narrowing your search down by clinical issue (treatment/diagnosis/prognosis/etiology) and search type (Broad/Focused). It is also possible to limit it to systematic reviews only, public health, and age limits (pedodontics/none).

Search strategies are based upon work done at the Forsyth Institute.

I have done some test searches and results are promising, especially when compared against PubMed's own Clinical Queries. Give it a go and let me know!