Researcher’s Toolkit:
Essential Clinical Resources and Search Techniques
Background Questions – A Short List of Key Resources:
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Start with Lane’s Clinical portal: http://lane.stanford.edu/portals/clinical.html
You can select and search a single e-resource from the Clinical Portal
You can also search multiple resources from the Portal using the “Clinical” metasearch filter
Diseases
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UpToDate: Highly-popular, aggressively updated general medical “e-textbook”
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eMedicine: Similar in concept to UpToDate, and particularly strong in pediatrics
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Harrisons and other specialty eBooks (to search eBooks, run a search in the “Clinical” search
box)
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DxPlain: decision support tool: you add signs/symptoms and DxPlain generates a differential
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Dorlands: The best medical dictionary. Available via the Desk Reference link on Lane’s
homepage
Lab Tests
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Micromedex Lab Advisor: lots of others, but Micromedex Lab Advisor is particularly easy-to-use
Drugs
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Micromedex: includes basic drug info, drug/drug interactions, pill ID, US names for foreign drugs,
toxicology data, and much more
LPCH-SHC CRL (Clinical Reference Library): includes the SHC and LPCH formularies
SHC and LPCH Antiobiograms: Antibiotic susceptibility of bacteria & yeast
Images (available via the “Learning and Images Tab” within the Clinical Portal)
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ImagesMD: great source of images with attribution. Includes illustrations, decision trees, flow
charts, ECGs, etc. Images may be emailed as PwrPt slides (register first on ImagesMD homepage)
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AnatomyTV: three-dimensional anatomy – very easy to copy and paste anatomical images
Patient Education
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MicroMedex Care Notes: Customized patient handouts used by Stanford Hospital and Clinics
Search Engines
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Google: Some quick tips: 1) to search a phrase, enclose terms in quotes, e.g., “prevalence of HIV
in Kenya” 2) to use Google to search a website, use the “site” command, e.g., glucowatch approval
site:fda.gov 3) to search for terms in the title of a webpage, use Advanced Search and change
anywhere in page to in the title of the page
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Google Scholar: Results are theoretically more “scholarly” than Google. Results also include a
crude estimate of the number of times the item was cited
PDA Resources (see “PDA Tools” from Lane’s homepage)
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Epocrates
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MicroMedex
Information Management
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EndNote, EndNote Web, RefWorks,
Lane Medical Library and Knowledge Management Center
Researcher’s Toolkit: Clinical Resources
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Foreground Questions – Databases and Search Strategies
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Databases: PubMed, PsycInfo (psychology), Cochrane (two databases, one containing systematic
reviews, the other clinical trials), CINAHL (nursing/allied health), ABI/Inform (lots on economic
implications of health and medicine – available via our Databases page, click on “All Stanford
Databases” )
Formulating the question: For clinical questions, use PICO to help develop an answerable clinical
question: Patient -- Intervention -- Comparison – Outcome
Example: How effective is azithromycin compared to amoxicillin-clavulanate in treating children
with acute otitis media? Patient – children w/ acute otitis media; Intervention – azithromycin;
Comparison – amoxicillin-clavulanate; Outcome – eradication of infection
Strategy 1: Clinical metasearch. Run a search of key terms in the Clinical Portal search box: amoxicillinclavulanate azithromycin acute otitis media children Use the PubMed Best Evidence section to select
systematic reviews, references from “core” clinical journals, or everything. Great when it works, otherwise,
you’ll need a different strategy.
Strategy 2: PubMed Clinical Queries. Enter amoxicillin-clavulanate azithromycin acute otitis media children
into the search box, select therapy as the category, narrow to limit the scope of the search, and click Go.
Clinical Queries adds terms to your search that tend to retrieve clinical trials. A great strategy when there are
clinical trials, otherwise, you’ll probably need to try something else.
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Strategy 3: Title Search. A great strategy for any database. Useful in PubMed particularly when Strategy 1
and 2 fail. Keep it simple! When you glance at the title of an article, what terms would tell you immediately
that the citation is relevant to your clinical question? If you don’t retrieve anything, broaden your search by
adding synonyms and truncation.
Connect directly to PubMed. Let’s use the asterisk “*” to truncate the word children. A search of child* will
retrieve child, children, etc. Enter your search terms and separate them with the boolean operator AND in
upper-case: amoxicillin-clavulanate AND azithromycin AND acute otitis media AND child* Any terms you
not separate with AND, PubMed may try to search as phrases.
Click the Limits tab, scroll to the bottom of the Limits page and choose Title from the Default Tag pull-down
menu and click Go. Find a relevant result, and click on the author’s names to view the citation. Click
Related Articles to quickly and easily locate similar articles.
Strategy 4: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Locate a relevant citation using Strategies 1, 2 or 3. Make
sure it’s labeled [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE], otherwise it won’t contain MeSH terms. Click on the
author’s names, then change Display from AbstractPlus to Citation. Click on a relevant MeSh term, and
then click MeSH to add the term to the MeSH Database
Click in the checkbox next to the MeSH term. From the Send To pull-down menu, select Search Box with
AND
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Use the Back button in your web browser to back up to the citation and click on other MeSH terms. After
you’ve finished adding the terms, click on Search PubMed
Now, we’ll use Limits to restrict our search to language, English. We’ll also limit to various types of articles,
Clinical Trial, Meta-Analysis, Randomized Controlled Trials, and age groups, All Child: 0-18 years.
Click Go to complete the search. Using MeSH is a very precise, very comprehensive way to search, but
does require some extra effort!
CS/May 2007
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Researcher’s Toolkit: Clinical Resources
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