Module 2, Question 3

I think each index/search engine has it's place. The guideline index would definitely be most useful to practitioners. It is also a good index because others have done all the research for you to come up with the current guidelines. It is also very specific. When I put in my search terms in the guideline index, I only got 2 items, and they were very specific. The other two methods were not as specific.

As a future instructor, I think the electronic indexes will be very useful. Since I won't have patients sitting right in front of me, waiting for me to make decisions on their care, I won't necessarily need the fast, specific information that is provided with the guidelines index. I will however, need access to the guidelines to teach my students the latest in about them, but I will also use the other indexes as well. The Google search was almost silly. So many items come up with Google, it's overwhelming. The other problem with the Google search, is that the first citations to come up are not ususally "scholarly" items. They seem to be aimed at the lay public. I tended to find things like support groups as opposed to legitimate research items. However, to the lay person, this is probably a good research tool to simply find out general information in order to speak somewhat intelligently to their provider. We just have to teach our patients which are reliable sources to turn to. In a previous class, someone suggested only recommending websites that end in "edu" or "org." I think that is good advice.

Module 2, Question 2

This past week, I have been learning to use EndNote. It does have some cool features. First of all, you are basically creating your own database of only the things that interest you. It's like your own mini PubMed that only contains the things you want. Secondly, it allows you to create groups that you can sort your items into and organize them that way. I could make as many and as detailed groups as I wanted.

The software also allows you to search within the database, itself. You could search by topic or author, for example. And say you wanted to send an article by a particular author to a collegue, you would just search for it, retrieve it and then send it. That's assuming the citation you found has a full text article associated with it. EndNote also allows you to find which citations have full text available, which is also a nice feature.

Module 2, Question 1

The clinical issue I wanted to look up was incompetent cervix. Since I am teaching nursing student, I tend to use the CINAHL and ERIC databases, but I wanted more practice with Pubmed. I am a L/D nurse and have personal experience with this particular topic, so I thought it would be a good one to search on Pubmed. I also wanted to find out about the identification of the problem, since it seems that to be diagnosed, a woman has to go through at least 1-2 losses. I was wondering if there were any new ways of identifying the condition before a woman has to experience a loss.

So, at first, I tried the keywords, "incompetent cervix, treatment and identification." I got zero findings with that, so I took out the word "identification." I also added some limits and with that, I got 55 items. The search wasn't very time consuming at all. I think Pubmed makes it easy, but you just have to know how to use Boolean terms and also know what the common MeSH headings are. But even that isn't too tricky, because each citaion has a list of MeSH headings that were used for it, and if you just start using those words in your searches, it makes it a lot easier. For me, as a future instructor, I don't think there will be barriers to using this, I would just have to have access to a computer, which I'm sure I will. But maybe for practitioners, this wouldn't be the best way because you get too many items back, and it does take time to go through them.