Monday, February 28, 2011

Blog Entry #3

  1. You used an electronic index, a guideline index, and a web search engine to retrieve information relevant to your clinical problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/ not useful for your information retrieval task, and why?
I was looking up information about methadone use in pregnancy and it’s implication on neonatal abstinence syndrome.  I conducted searches through a web search (google.com) a guideline index (the National Guideline Clearinghouse), and an electronic index (Endnote). 
When I searched with google.com I obtained over 13,000 results including articles and books.  When I went into Google scholar I was able to find articles that were related to my search.  I was able to limit my search to the last 5 years and have it include the citations.  I went under preferences and was able to apply more limits.  I found several relevant research articles, but was not always able to read the full text since some of the different libraries online require subscriptions to access the articles.  These research articles are from scholarly resources.
I haven’t used the National Guideline Clearinghouse prior to this.  I did not find it difficult to use, but I was not able to get any guidelines that pertained to my search.  I found only one guideline that had to do with methadone in pregnancy and it had to do with decreasing dosing during pregnancy.  There was no guideline that had to do with the neonatal abstinence syndrome.  The good part of the search was that it gives you some MeSH terms that could be used in the electronic index search.
In my electronic index search through Endnote I was able to get results for articles through PubMed and one film from 1998 called Unborn Addicts.  Through PubMed I was able to get 194 article references.  Through Endnote I can search several libraries and can obtain the citations.  I can put the references into a group so that it is easy to find and they are all together in one place.  I can also use these references to cite in papers that I write for school. 
I found that my preference is the electronic index search because through the University I am able to get the articles without having to pay for several subscriptions.  I didn’t get any pertinent information about my topic on the National Guideline Clearinghouse.  I found relevant information on Google scholar, but I would have to write down the articles and go back through the University library to obtain the copies of them.  With Endnote I can look up to see if the articles are available online.  If not I can use those references to look them up in the library, but I don’t have to write it all down and keep track of the information.  It also allows me to make citations in Microsoft word.  It is very helpful, easy to use, and allows ways to share the information with others.

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