Module 2

I used PubMed as my electronic index and this was very helpful when accessing my clinical problem of treating diabetic foot ulcers with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I found this to be a narrow topic that produced good information. This information was useful because it produced citations from medical journals and I set limits for randomized control trials which compared hyperbaric oxygen therapy with traditional therapy, this narrowed my citations down to 11.

The guideline index I used was the National Guideline Clearinghouse. This was not helpful in my search at all. I never had any results from my clinical problem and I tried to be more broad in my terms and entering diabet* for the disease/condition. I chose to do this so this index would not only look up information for diabetic, but also diabetes, diabetics, etc. This also did not help. I also omitted the term hyperbaric and just simply entered oxygen therapy, which also produced no results. The index recommended I truncate the terms, which I already had with diabetes. Just for fun I wanted to see what information National Guideline Clearinghouse did have on diabetes so I looked under Endocrine System Diseases then Diabetes Mellitus, which produced 83 guidelines. This produced a general list of guidelines for treating patients with diabetes, like how to give SubQ injections, diabetes in pregnancy, and primary prevention of kidney disease. Thus, my narrow search of hyperbaric oxygen therapy would never be found in this index. I feel like this is information we should know coming out of school and we shouldn't have to look this up.

I chose to use Google Scholar as my web search engine and surprisingly I did not get back thousands of citations for my clinical problem, only 22. But, I did put a limitation on the search: only search in Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science. When I put the same search terms into regular Google and performed the search I was amazed that my citations were 22,500. I did not put limitations in this search criteria. Google Scholar produced some of the same results as PubMed, however many of these articles do not come in full text or as a free download. Some citations are around $20 per article. This route is not cohesive to a graduate student, I will be using PubMed through the library or EndNote to look for articles in full text.