The many and varied world of the HealthCare blogger and Health Tweeple has led me to be connected with @doctorblogs, which in turn led to the exploration of the blogs on OnMedica.com.
OnMedica has a great range of clinical articles, blogs, news and views but I was particularly taken with the medical search engine ‘Dr Socrates Medical Search’.
The search engine is clean, crisp and efficient and utilises a default set of search engines (as outlined below). There is thoughtful presentation of results bot in standard form and as ‘expandable topic clusters’ cluster results to assist in narrowing the search terms. The clusters provide a topical overview of the collated search results within a single field and are a practical way to find ‘buried resources’
Dr Socrates also supports an advanced query syntax similar to that of other major search engines (for the majority of search queries). Although primarily aimed at doctors, onmedica.com is also a valuable resource for nurses, pharmacists, medical students, and other healthcare professionals.
We have created Dr Socrates for busy clinicians who want to quickly find relevant information. The search algorithm and strategy has been designed after consultation with hundreds of OnMedica’s doctors and our editorial board, with some final touches applied by the OnMedica team.
So far Dr Socrates search has returned a wide variety of useful results ranging form peer reviewed articles and clinical guidelines through to MCQ questions. The ‘Vivisimo’ powered search engine explores a large number of online eLearning resources including:
• Anaesthesia UK
• Bandolier
• Nice guidelines
• OnMedica
• Patient.co.uk
• Department of Health
• Royal College of General Practitioners UK
• Electronic medicines compendium
• General Medical Council
• Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network
• and many more including Google Scholar – NetDoctor – UK national LIbrary of Health – NHS clinical knowledge summaries – Medscape (medline and drug reference)
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About Mike Cadogan
Definitely a valid idea…
I gave it a try just now with some typical web searches (for an orthopaedic surgeon).
Must admit I was a tad disappointed. Firstly it didn’t really give me useful results. e.g. I searched for “Latissimus Dorsi transfer” and only the 9th result returned had something remotely relevant to this search term.
Secondly, while it is nice to have a search engine that indexes the reviewed literature and useful medical resources there are already many such tools available that are much more mature than this offering (as you showed so well in your articles on Go Pubmed etc.).
The clusters it creates in its sidebar are useful but, on their own, not a winning feature. Therefore, I can’t really see the benefit of this tool over a simple google search.
I’m not cynical…at least I hope not, I just don’t see the benefit. I’m open to hear anyone’s comments.
Definitely a valid idea…
I gave it a try just now with some typical web searches (for an orthopaedic surgeon).
Must admit I was a tad disappointed. Firstly it didn’t really give me useful results. e.g. I searched for “Latissimus Dorsi transfer” and only the 9th result returned had something remotely relevant to this search term.
Secondly, while it is nice to have a search engine that indexes the reviewed literature and useful medical resources there are already many such tools available that are much more mature than this offering (as you showed so well in your articles on Go Pubmed etc.).
The clusters it creates in its sidebar are useful but, on their own, not a winning feature. Therefore, I can’t really see the benefit of this tool over a simple google search.
I’m not cynical…at least I hope not, I just don’t see the benefit. I’m open to hear anyone’s comments.
Thanks Orthopod Duffy
Agreed that there are many more sophisticated search engines available for advanced searches such as GoPubMed.org and Cognition Medline.
Recently I have been working with the nursing staff in the ED to benchmark clinical guidelines in the department and found the DrSocrates portal a useful search from that end. Certainly the clusters are not as semantically comprehensive as ScienceRoll for example, but the portal is still a useful medium to search across 10 of the more frequently cited UK review sites.
Sandnsurf
Thanks Orthopod Duffy
Agreed that there are many more sophisticated search engines available for advanced searches such as GoPubMed.org and Cognition Medline.
Recently I have been working with the nursing staff in the ED to benchmark clinical guidelines in the department and found the DrSocrates portal a useful search from that end. Certainly the clusters are not as semantically comprehensive as ScienceRoll for example, but the portal is still a useful medium to search across 10 of the more frequently cited UK review sites.
Sandnsurf