[LIS-Forum] PPT Slides Available for REUSE on "Bio-Medical Information Retrieval from Net"

Sukhdev Singh esukhdev at gmail.com
Wed Dec 12 11:22:38 IST 2007


I have delivered a lecture at Lady Irwin College (New Delhi) yesterday
on "Bio-Medical Information Retrieval from Net". I wish to share my
lecture slides with you. The Presentation consists of over 90 Power
Point PPT slides. It has been prepared keeping in mind the information
needs of Bio-Medical Researchers. However it does not include Paid /
Fee based services like "Web of Science".

The presentation can be viewed or Downloaded (for reuse) from
http://snipurl.com/1v51n

Presentation starts with an emphasis need for having a planned search
strategy and evaluation of the retrieved results. The best tool and
Internet resource to explore would depend upon the type of information
being sought from the net. For general non-scholarly information
Internet Search Engines, Meta Search Engines, Web Directories and
Subject Guides would be the best way to start with. However there is
need to evaluate all such information. Simple criteria - like the
authority behind the information; the date of creation and
modification and commercial interests if any - can be used to evaluate
the authenticity of the information retrieved. Medical websites with
"HONcode" logo could be easily evaluated and trusted.

For scholarly literature, researchers are advised to start with
Bibliographic Databases. These databases provide references to high
quality peer reviewed journals. PubMed and IndMED (For Indian
Journals) are best known under this category. The presentation has
some interesting pictures to explain the need for "Controlled
Vocabulary" like MeSH. Other tools like Scirus can also be used for
retrieving scholarly information.  Google Scholar can be used to for
limited "Cited By" information along with references.

Coming to Full Text of articles, looking for libraries' holdings would
be a better strategy. "Union Catalogue" is useful tool to explore
collection of neighborhood libraries. Many good journals are now
coming out from Open Access Publishers like BioMed Central and PLoS.
Some of the good Indian medical journals are also available for free
through Internet. NIC's medIND project and MedKnow (an Indian Open
Access Publisher) have been instrumental in putting most of them
online. Directory of Open Access Journals is a useful tool to find out
Open Access Journals in a subject domain. Other resources for finding
full text articles are Institutional (like EPrints at IISc ) and Subject
Repositories (like OpenMED at NIC). There are now about 1000 such
registered and OAI-PMH compliant repositories all over the world.
Tools like ROAR can used to find a relevant repository. These
repositories can also be searched through search engine like Google
and some special OAI-PMH search engines.

The presentation ends with some special type of resources like
Cochrane Library (made freely accessible to Resident Indians through
sponsorship by ICMR).


--Sukhdev Singh, NIC.

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