Created by MSKCC’s Integrative Medicine Service, the web page on herbs, botanicals and supplements offers a wealth of information which can be useful for oncologists, healthcare professionals and consumers.    There are over 500 profiles which include an image, topics of concern to healthcare professionals such as pharmacokinetics, mechanisms of action and herb-drug interactions, as well as topics of interest to the consumer, including patient warnings and side effects.

The inclusion of numerous references to the literature found in the healthcare professional portion of the profiles, contributes to the credibility and reliability of this comprehensive and well researched resource.

Scirus is a search engine which currently indexes 545 million science-related web pages including .edu, .org and .gov sites.  A useful option offered by Scirus is that search results can be exported to a citation management program.  Results can be filtered by source such as PubMed or ScienceDirect.  They also can be limited to patent results via Lexis Nexis or to theses and dissertations from various university repositories.  File types is another filter available so you can limit to PowerPoint documents, PDF or HTML. Continue reading →

If you have saved a search strategy in PubMed using the My NCBI option, you soon will be able to modify the search terms to refine or refocus your query.  An example would be: Original saved search – colorectal cancer screening among African Americans – colorectal cancer AND screening AND African Americans.

You may want to refocus the search on a different population and can do so by making changes in the “Search terms” box, e.g. colorectal cancer AND screening AND Latinos.  You can then click on the “Test search terms” link to look at the results before saving the revised search strategy.  See a description of this upcoming enhancement to My NCBI in the NLM Technical Bulletin.