Book Reviews

Title: Field Guide to MEDLINE: Making Searching Simple Author: Christopher Stave, MLS, lead Instruction and Outreach Librarian, Lane Medical Library, Stanford University School of Medicine Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Details: Published 2003, ISBN 0781734770 (paperback), 175 pages, $32.95 list price

Reviewer: Judith Broadhurst, writer and editor, Polished Prose editorial services

Reviewed: March 2003

Intended audience

From the preface: "The Field Guide to MEDLINE: Making Searching Simple is designed for the busy health care professional who is looking for a practical, easy-to-use guide to MEDLINE via PubMed or Ovid."

Intended Purpose

The main purpose of this pocket guide is to help medical and related professionals construct and conduct faster, easier and more effective MEDLINE searches. It also helps you decide when it's more appropriate to use the free PubMed interface for MEDLINE or Ovid, a commercial (fee-based) alternative, in case you have access to both or wonder whether it's worth subscribing to Ovid.

Context and Content

MEDLINE archives change daily and PubMed services change almost weekly, yet it's been four years since the last guide to MEDLINE was published, and there have been only two books before this one that focused solely on MEDLINE and were intended for professionals, rather than consumers. The author, Christopher Stave, MLS, is the lead Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Stanford University School of Medicine's Lane Medical Library. He teaches workshops at Stanford on searching MEDLINE and related subjects, both through the library and as part of the med school's medical informatics courses.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of medical bibliographic databases and tips for when to use which ones. Chapter 2 is an orientation to MEDLINE's structure and to basic search strategies, as well as an intro to the pros and cons of PubMed (free) vs. Ovid (fee), including these main points:

PubMed Advantages

• Fast
• Free
• Growing number of links from PubMed citations to online resources (e.g., electronic journals)
• Multiple search modes
• Multiple document delivery options
• Ability to store searches

Ovid Advantages

• Extremely well-designed search interface
• Multiple-database searching (with duplicate deletions)
• Excellent phrase and adjacency search options
• Ability to rerun saved searches automatically and to receive results via e-mail

Stave goes into both in considerable depth in separate chapters devoted to each service. The two appendices cover Ovid's evidence-based medicine reviews collection (Cochrane's Database of Systematic Reviews, for instance) and other databases, such as ClinicalTrials.gov and LOCATORplus. There's a five-page glossary at the end, too, so you'll know what terms such as "check tags" and "explode" mean in this context.

Highlights

This smallish book is filled with full-color screenshots, often two or three to a page, which is invaluable in helping the reader understand the explanations in the narrative text. The author gives detailed instructions for designing search strategies and other approaches to try if your first attempts don't produce the results you need. The effect is like looking over the author's shoulder while he patiently explains things to you, step by step.

The core sections on PubMed and Ovid are each broken down into three subsections:

• Overview, Screens, and Tools
• Searching (by single citation, author or using various methods for topics)
• Post-Search Data Management

That last section covers downloading and saving your search results, using commercial citation management software, and ordering full-text articles when they're not available free. The orientation to MEDLINE's relatively new Cubby service, alone, will make your searches less frustrating and time-consuming almost instantly. And did you know that, contrary to what many supposed experts say, you can search online for articles published pre-MEDLINE (OLDMEDLINE), from 1957–1965? (See LOCATORplus.)

This is a book you need to keep handy while you're working on becoming more of a whiz at online research, so it's designed to tuck into a lab or suit coat pocket (about 8 in. H x 4.5 in. W). It's basically a lucid, logical tutorial. If you invest the time to go through each of the five or so search strategies included in both the PubMed and Ovid sections, you will not only get better results, but you will surely save countless hours ever after.

Limitations

Overall, this book is a gem. The only serious drawback is that the narrative text is in 8-point type, which makes it extremely difficult to read if you're over 40 (or younger, but tired). It would also be far easier to use in spiral-bound rather than perfect-bound format. If the publisher reprints it, let's hope they ditch the pocket-sized guide idea and whatever motivation to save printing costs that influenced the decision of the design for this first edition and make readability and usability higher priorities.