November 2006 | Back to Table of Contents

Perspective

Cool Tools

Google, RSS, Podcasts, Oh My!

By Melissa L. Rethlefsen, M.L.S., and Colin M. Segovis

Are you relying on the newspaper to keep up with the latest medical research? Storing your favorite articles in a pile on your desk? Finding the 604 million results for your Google search on cancer a few too many to wade through? If you’re feeling swamped by information, it’s no wonder: 684,114 articles were added to PubMed in 2005 alone. Although you may not be able to slow the flood of information, some new tools and some old favorites will help you ride the tide without getting swept away.

Dozens of search engines want your business, from well-known ones such as Yahoo and Google, to metasearch engines such as Ixquick and Mamma, to health search portals Healia and Search Medica. Google is the most popular search engine in the United States; it accounts for almost 50 percent of all search traffic on the Web. Its closest competitor, Yahoo!, garners only about 24 percent, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks Web site traffic. Since no search engine covers everything on the Web, it’s good to try out a few. In this article, we will focus on the most popular one, Google, and its new tools for health care providers and consumers.

• Making Google Work for You

  Google is the most widely used Web search engine in the United States for good reason—it works. But everyone has experienced more than a little frustration with the glut of hits that appear for each search (see “Searching Quick Tips,” on p. 35 to learn how to search more efficiently). Luckily, Google has a few tricks up its sleeve to help you find high-quality medical information without getting bogged down.

  Google recently announced the release of a new beta product, Google Co-op. Although it still has some kinks, it promises to deliver high-quality health information to physicians and consumers.

  What is Google Co-op? Well, if you have searched Google on a health topic in recent months, you may have seen it already. When Google recognizes a search for a health topic, whether it is a disease, symptom, or drug, Google gives the searcher new options for refining the results. For instance, you can look at information for health professionals, for patients, and by medical authorities. You also can limit results to those about clinical trials, symptoms, or side effects.

  How does it work? Essentially, Google worked with several leading consumer health Web sites such as MayoClinic.com to “tag” those sites. When you choose a refinement, you are not searching the whole Web, just a portion that has been tagged for each category, meaning you have fewer results to wade through.

  Google Co-op offers a few more amenities for health professionals through its subscription feature, which allows you to receive content from Epocrates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Library of Medicine through the Google Co-op directory (www.google.com/coop/ directory). After subscribing to a content provider, whenever you do a search, a green box with links to content will appear. For example, a subscription to Epocrates will add direct links to the Epocrates monograph, dosing information, and a list of adverse reactions for any given drug to the top of your Google results.

• Creating Personalized Home Pages

  If you use Google regularly, consider creating a personalized home page (www.google.com/ig). Personalizing your Google home page allows you to concentrate much of your daily Web activity into one place by adding functions such as a calculator, a to-do list, a calendar, a stock tracker, a dictionary, games, words of the day, and weekly, updated tables of contents from the Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, MMWR, Science, Nature, and several other publications.

  You can also add links to dozens of news sources, including many major newspapers and journals. Several news sources are health-specific, and the Google news module allows you to get updates on any topic you specify on your home page (to set this up, click on “add more to this page” to get to the modules).

  You can also use your personalized home page to track your past Google searches, enabling you to return to Web pages you’ve found in the past a little more quickly. No personal information is required to create a personalized page that you can call up on a single computer. To create one that you can access on any computer, you will need to create a Google account, which does require personal information.

  Netvibes, Pageflakes, and My Yahoo! are other sites that let you create personalized home pages.

• Souping Up PubMed

  PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) is the “go-to” search tool for many of us in the biomedical sciences. This free service provided by the National Library of Medicine searches more than 16 million journal article citations from MEDLINE and other databases that are updated daily. PubMed is continuously upgrading its services, and some of its new and old offerings are particularly useful.

  The Clipboard is one of PubMed’s nicest features. Accessible from a tab below the search box, it enables you to do multiple searches and keep your favorite results from each one. Using the Clipboard involves two steps: checking the boxes next to the citations you like and then clicking on the “Send to” box and scrolling down to “Clipboard.” Your chosen citations will be stored in the Clipboard and marked in green during subsequent searches, so you can easily skip over results you’ve already seen.

  Best of all is the group of features called “My NCBI” that allow you to customize your interaction with PubMed. In addition to its search- saving and alerting features, My NCBI has a few more tricks up its sleeve. For example, the new “Collections” feature allows you to permanently save sets of citations, with up to 500 entries per set. To use Collections, send your chosen citations to the Clipboard, then go to the Clipboard and select My NCBI Collections from the “Send to” menu.

  The Filters tool under My NCBI Resources lets you customize how search results are displayed and sorted. By default, PubMed results are organized under two tabs: “All results” and “Review articles.” With the Filters tool, you can add more tabs, customized to your preferences. Perhaps you are a pediatrician and want to limit the results of your search to those about children; you can create a tab to single out those articles. Or if you want a quick way to find evidence-based medicine resources, you can create a “Randomized control trials” tab or a “Systematic reviews” tab. For more information about using PubMed’s filters, go to www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/viewlet/myncbi/filters.swf.

Keeping Up

The amount of new literature and practice information available to physicians is increasing at an exponential rate. Yet the amount of time physicians can devote to sorting through it is not. Given the onslaught of new information made available to the medical community on a daily basis, the following tools can help you manage and access what you need in your practice.

• RSS

  Behind many of today’s technologies for keeping current lies RSS, a system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite Web sites. RSS makes it easy for you to keep up with the latest scholarly information and news by turning your desktop into your own personalized newspaper. You can skim the headlines and read what you want, when you want. To use RSS, you need an RSS reader, which is a piece of software used to access your selected RSS feeds, which are offered by dozens of content providers. There are a number of Web-based and stand-alone RSS readers available (see “Where to Find Them”); indeed, the increasing popularity of this technology has led Web browsers, including Safari, Opera, Firefox 2.0, and the soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 7, to include built-in RSS support and even RSS readers.

  Deciding which RSS reader to use is a matter of personal preference. If you want the basics, try Newshutch, Bloglines, or Rojo, all of which are Web-based readers. If you want more features such as synchronization (the ability to download your items and read them later), advanced capability for making enclosures such as audio and video files easier to download, and powerful filtering capabilities, try a stand-alone reader such as NewsGator, FeedDemon, or BlogBridge. Web-based readers often have fewer features than stand-alone readers, but you can access your account from any computer and they are generally free. Personalized home page tools such as Google Personalized Home, My Yahoo!, Pageflakes, and Netvibes also act as RSS readers, allowing you to add custom RSS feeds to your home page along with other content.

  After installing the RSS software or setting up an account with a Web-based reader, you are ready to go. For each feed that you subscribe to, updates will appear each time you check your RSS reader. These updates will most often look like headlines or a snippet of the text that can be expanded to the full article.

  Finding the RSS feeds you want is usually as easy as clicking a button and copying and pasting a URL into your reader. There are many types of feeds available, from blogs to tables of contents of medical journals to literature search updates to audio news broadcasts. Search for an orange XML, RSS, or Atom button on the page of the feed you are interested in, or look for a subscription link. If you are lucky enough to have a Web browser with integrated RSS support, you will be able to tell whenever a page you are on has associated RSS feeds because the orange button will automatically appear.

  RSS feeds are found on many Web sites but are commonly found on news sites. The New York Times online, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune all have RSS feeds. Many journals also have RSS feeds, often for their tables of contents and sometimes for the latest medical news. News feeds typically update many times a day, although tables of contents will only update when a new issue of the publication is released. Some news services, such as Google News, feature health-only news subscriptions or allow you to set up an RSS feed on a customized topic.

  Getting tables of contents through RSS is great, but what about those journals that don’t have RSS feeds, or what if you want updates on a specific topic of interest? PubMed offers RSS feeds for any search you can dream up: by topic, by author, by journal, or using any combination thereof. Creating PubMed feeds takes only a few seconds. Once you’ve done the search you want, click on the “Send to” menu and choose “RSS Feed.” Fill in a few details, get the RSS feed URL, paste it in your RSS reader’s subscription area, and you are ready to be kept up to date.

• Blogs

  Blogs, or Web logs, are Web pages designed to give frequent updates, whether they are about one person’s thoughts or an organization’s latest events. The relatively easy-to-use blogging software enables even nontechies to share their knowledge on the Web. Because blogs can be updated in seconds, they provide information on a topic well in advance of published literature and provide opportunities for discussion with colleagues. Blogs are becoming more and more popular and respected as a form of communication and collaboration; you may be seeing them used in your institution already. Nature recently released a list of the top 50 blogs in science (www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/multimedia/50_science_blogs.html).

• Podcasts

  If you have an iPod or work with students who do, you may already be familiar with podcasts. Podcasts are generally regular audio or video (also called vodcasts) broadcasts on the Web distributed to subscribers using RSS. A few medical journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine provide audio overviews of their latest issues, for example. Podcasts are also available from organizations such as Johns Hopkins University and the American College of Cardiology. More and more educational institutions are making their lectures available online as podcasts as well.

• Alerts

  E-mail alerts are another option for keeping current. Although they are much less organized than RSS feeds, e-mail alerts show up in a place you already check—your e-mail in-box. They can include the table of contents of the current issue of a journal with links to articles or news stories about topics of interest, so check the Web site of your favorite journal to see if there is an e-mail alerting service available. If you like to stay current on the latest health news and prefer e-mail alerts, try Google News’s news alerts service (www.google.com/alerts?hl=en). For any keywords you choose, Google can e-mail you all the latest news stories as they happen, once a day, or once a week.

  PubMed also offers an alert service. Once you have created an account, you can have PubMed run your saved searches automatically and then e-mail you the results. Check out My NCBI Quick Tours (www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/myncbi.html) to learn more.

Managing Information

• Social Bookmarking

  Most people have used their Web browser’s bookmarking or favorites feature. These are valuable tools, but bookmarks and favorites quickly fall into disarray. Even when well-organized, they are tied to the computer on which you set them up. Since many people use multiple computers every day, this can be a problem. This is where social bookmarking comes in.

  Social bookmarking sites are changing the way we manage our bookmarks. You no longer need to keep a static list in one location; instead, you can post your bookmarks to a Web site, where you can access them from any computer connected to the Internet.

  Although accessibility is the best feature of social bookmarking tools, they also help you organize and manage information. You can add tags, or keywords, to each bookmark to make them easy to find; the tags are browsable and searchable, as are the titles and descriptions for each bookmark. The other key feature of social bookmarking tools is the ability to easily share your bookmarks with others. Seeing what other people are bookmarking can help you find important sites that you otherwise might overlook. If you are not interested in sharing, most tools have a privacy option.

  There are a number of free social bookmarking tools, each with slightly different features. Connotea is one that’s geared toward the scientist. Created and operated by the Nature Publishing Group, it goes one step beyond generic social bookmarking to managing your collection of journal articles and books. What makes Connotea special is its ability to recognize journal articles, preprints, and books; to create group collections (collections of resources shared among people interested in the same topic, working on the same paper, or working in the same institution, for example), and to facilitate collaboration and communication between scholars. With one click, you can add an online article to your Connotea library.

  Connotea is not the only tool to provide this kind of social reference managing—CiteULike, BibSonomy, and Complore are others—but it is the only one specific to science and medicine.

  If you use EndNote or another bibliographic management software tool, you can import your citations directly into or export them back out of Connotea. Connotea is compatible with a number of online journals, publishers and databases, including PubMed, BioMed Central, Nature, Science, Blackwell Synergy, Wiley Interscience, and Amazon. You can also include general bookmarks in your Connotea library, not just articles and books.

• Keeping Notes

  Several other tools are now available that allow you to store notes, annotations, and other documents online. Diigo, for example, stores your bookmarks, but also lets you mark up and annotate any page on the Web, save those annotations, and search your saved pages and annotations. Other tools such as Google Notebook (www.google.com/notebook) and Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) work with your Web browser to save portions of Web pages and keep them in a single location.

Conclusion

Keeping current with the latest medical news, practice guidelines, and scientific findings is essential to the practice of medicine, but doing so can be a daunting task given the amount of information that’s becoming available every day. The tools and techniques we’ve discussed will help you maximize the time you spend online and avoid information overload. MM

Melissa Rethlefsen is an education technology librarian and Colin Segovis is an M.D./Ph.D. student at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.