Today, VisualDx, a visual diagnostic decision support system MSK Library subscribes to, is releasing a significantly enhanced new version. The product, which has been around since 1999, is expanding its coverage of general medicine, thereby more than doubling the number of diagnoses from the 1,300 included in the earlier VisualDx to 2,700 or more diagnoses available in the new version. The new VisualDx is also going to include additional images (including radiologic images), as well as, previously unavailable guided chief complaint questionnaires, among other new content.

Another big enhancement is the introduction of VisualDx’s exclusive Sympticon technology, whereby users will be presented with graphical representations of the patterns of symptoms and other findings, not just with lists of diagnoses, as was the case before. Sympticons will provide users with the powerful ability to compare the features of each potential diagnosis on one screen. Continue reading →

When searching the medical literature to identify the studies that can serve as the “best evidence” for answering a focused clinical question, the PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) model is a useful way to use to ensure that you have considered all the component parts of the question.

To make this process easier on the database searcher, EMBASE has now created a new PICO search form that can be used to easily develop this type of multi-component search strategy. Continue reading →

The MSK Library subscribes to a subset of bibliographic databases called Citation Analysis Tools, including Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier).  When you conduct literature searches in these databases, along with the standard citation and abstract information for the article, you also get to see each article’s bibliography, as well as, which publications have cited that article since its publication.

Here’s why these databases are considered to be “powerhouse” research tools by librarians:

• Great for electronically harvesting relevant citations from the bibliographies of relevant articles. These are very useful tools for identifying more articles that are similar in topic to the one where you begin your search (potentially leading to both older articles and more current ones). Continue reading →