MeSH on demand

This one may be useful for 3rd year undergraduates and above if you are doing a literature search and are looking for keywords.  MeSH stands for 'Medical Subject Headings' and is basically a controlled list of keywords which are used to index material in the Medline database.  Sometimes it can be hard to think of the right keywords, and MeSH headings in particular can be, well, obscure, shall we say?!

MeSH on demand is an online service which allows you to paste an abstract (or any chunk of text) into the database and it will retrieve a list of MeSH keywords for you.  Potentially useful for those of you doing a systematic review.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!  Find it here.

Child health app

Public Health England has developed an app which provides child health profiles for England. Arranged by local authority, the app gives uses key health indicators to give data about the health and wellbeing of children in England.

Read more here.http://www.chimat.org.uk/profiles/app

Setting up a search alert in Ebsco databases

If you are working on a big project, or you simply need to keep on top of the latest research, a very useful tool can be the search alert feature in Ebsco databases. You can save a search as an alert which will then run 'behind the scenes' and email you the results. So, in theory, you only need to search the database once and from then on it does the rest of the work for you! You need an EbscoHost account in order to use this feature (free to sign up).

Here's a great video which explains the process:

Introducing Quertle

Quertle is a new search engine specialising in biomedical literature but also covering health care. It's still very new (and seems mostly to have content which has been culled from BioMed Central and PubMed Central at the moment) but it's worth keeping an eye on. Quertle's unique-selling-point is the way it searches using "conceptual relationships", supposedly making your search results more relevant. A quick search for diabetes retrieves almost 200,000 hits, so there's certainly plenty to read.