Google

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What the Web Will Look Like In 5 Years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,”

Found his observations on teenagers impressive, does he still have teenagers himself? But I think he is right about teenagers using the Internet, using one app after the other, switching very fast.

 

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How and Why Junior Physicians use Web 2.0

medicine 2.0

The answers:

  • 89% (32/35) of physicians used at least one Web 2.0 tool in their medical practice, with 80% (28/35) reporting the use of wikis, only one respondent contributed to web 2.0 making regular contribution to a medical wiki site
  • physicians checked for medical information on an average of 2.6 different sites a day, with 1.4 visits a day or 53% of the total (235/444) being to sites using user-generated or Web 2.0 content
  • most commonly visited sites were Google, used on 32% of all recorded cases (142/444) and by 80% (28/35) of all physicians, and Wikipedia in 26% (115/44) of cases and by 70% (25/35) of all physicians
  • 53% (235/444) of cases the information used was Web 2.0 content. Other content used was from traditional sites such as PubMed and hybrid sites such as www.bmj.com which not only publishes peer reviewed content but also has blogs and rapid responses
  • The principle motivation for using the internet for information seeking was its ease of use, cited by 93% (33/35) of physicians
  • it had better information than alternatives such as medical textbooks (more up to date, covering more topics, and allowing extras such as interactive images)
  • the main reasons against using the Web 2.0 was the limits to information found (72% or 27/35 of physicians) such as quality and information overload
  • the purposes for which physicians used the Web were to solve an immediate defined problem and secondly, for background reading on a subject. The former being the use of the internet for simple clinical decision support, the latter as a tools for ongoing medical education that precipitated the use of Web 2.0.
  • Web 2.0 tools were strongly used for open questions (82% or 107/130 of search cases using Web 2.0) and hybrid or best evidence
    tools for closed questions (84% 90/107 of search cases using these tools).
  • 68% of physicians noted using Google as a navigation device, they already knew which content sites they would trust, and were using the search engine to get to the appropriate part of the site quickly.
  • The physicians noted that patients used Internet for information which could be discussed with their doctors
  • Physicians didn’t need technical skills for searching but need training in identifying trustworthy sites, have understanding of the quality of the information
  • Physicians complained about the lack of access, in some clinics Google was blocked based on the policy of the clinic in question

“Web 2.0” refers to what is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

web 2.0 use

In short, junior physicians used web 2.0 tools because of the ease of use and accessibility and up to date information but they were also aware of the limitations in the quality or usefulness of information found. Web 2.0 tools were used for open questions to get background or overview information on a topic while more traditional tools were used for closed questions to get specific information or double check. Google was also used to identify and navigate known and trusted site.

Overall web 2.0 tools are used mostly for background questions instead of clinical decisions. Stilll some fears exists that due to the ease of use and breadth of information more use of web 2.0 tools will be made in the future. The researchers used junior physicians since they are more at ease using web 2.0 tools, are more competent in using the Internet than older physicians and they are our future doctors.

For me the most important conclusion is:

… ensuring physicians have the skills to determine what credible internet information is, and may require research to investigate what really constitutes sufficient steps to “validate” the accuracy of information found

Let’s hope our younger web savvy colleagues will in a later stage contribute to the medical content on the Internet.

ResearchBlogging.org
Hughes, B., Joshi, I., Lemonde, H., & Wareham, J. (2009). Junior physician’s use of Web 2.0 for information seeking and medical education: A qualitative study International Journal of Medical Informatics DOI: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2009.04.008

 

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What is the best medical database to search?

medical library

The best database with search engine is PubMed. It is free and the keyword search with PubMed offers optimal update frequency and includes online early articles. It is also quick and easy to use.

Google Scholar is also free but it offers results of inconsistent accuracy. It can help in the retrieval of even the most obscure information but its use is marred by inadequate, less often updated, citation information. It updates once a month. Much information about its content coverage remains unknown and results with Google Scholar are displayed in relation to times of visits from users, not in relation to another index of quality of the publication.

Two other important biomedical databases are Scopus and Web of Science. These two also offer citation analysis

Due to the unprecedented growth of electronic resource (e-resource) availability, one of the questions currently being explored is, “how often are e-resources being cited in my field?”. It uses citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researchers. It is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics. Automated citation analysis has changed the nature of the research allowing millions of citations to be analyzed for large scale patterns.

For some this is an important feature, mostly for scientists struggling to survive in an academic swamp. For physicians and patients this feature is not important.

Scopus is the only European database, and both Scopus and Web of Science belong to commercial providers and require an access fee. Both Scopus and Web of science are readily updated for printed literature but do not include online early versions as PubMed does. Both databases include only published articles and not online early ones.

PubMed focuses mainly on medicine and biomedical sciences, whereas Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar cover most scientific fields. Web of Science covers the oldest publications, because its indexed and archived records go back to 1900. PubMed allows the larger number of keywords per search but is the only database of the four that does not provide citation analysis. Scopus includes articles published from 1966 on, but information regarding citation analysis is available only for articles published after 1996.

From a previous post: Google is significantly more efficient in searching for specific medical information than other search engines such as Yahoo!, Ask.com and Wikipedia. Moreover, general search engines guide users to websites likely to contain information on a topic of interest with greater efficiency than directly accessing an individual website (eg, Wikipedia, MDconsult and others). But google was only very efficient in this study probably because it was used by web savvy professionals and the type of information for which they were seeking was very specific.

Using Search Engines to Find Online Medical Information

If you want to use more general search engines such as google instead of these previous discussed biomedical databases there is a good introduction on how to use Google for searching for medical information on PLoS Medicine: Using Search Engines to Find Online Medical Information, freely available and open access.

ResearchBlogging.org
M. E. Falagas, E. I. Pitsouni, G. A. Malietzis, G. Pappas (2007). Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses The FASEB Journal, 22 (2), 338-342 DOI: 10.1096/fj.07-9492LSF
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli (2005). Using Search Engines to Find Online Medical Information PLoS Medicine, 2 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020228
P JOHNSON, J CHEN, J ENG, M MAKARY, E FISHMAN (2008). A Comparison of World Wide Web Resources for Identifying Medical Information Academic Radiology, 15 (9), 1165-1172 DOI: 10.1016/j.acra.2008.02.010

 

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Information Trapping, Real-Time research on the Web, book review


This excellent book by Tara Calishain is worth every penny. She is the autor of ResearchBuzz, a website with news about search engines, databases and other information collections.

When I walked in to this book I remembered her name from other excellent books so I had a look inside. Immediately I was seized by her examples of how you could use information trapping. In my case I just started a blog about depression and electroconvulsive therapy and related psychiatric subjects. I was wondering how to keep up with all the information on the web. For my job as a psychiatrist, teacher and researcher keeping up with all the new articles, websites, scientific papers is an every day struggle. Since I am very interested in getting as much information with the least effort for my work and now my blog this book seemed to me an excellent introduction in how to use the computer to gain these goals.
After the first introductory chapter about information trapping the book starts of with three other important chapters in which RSS feeds, page monitors and e-mail alerts are explained and how they can help you finding information in different ways.

These chapters are full of examples with their advantages and disadvantages. After explaining how you can find RSS feeds and which websites are of help she continues in explaining the two different types of feeds and more important which feed to use and when. This chapter ends with a description of the most important feed readers and their characteristics.

The next chapter about page monitors was new to me. The most important web based and client based page monitors are described including their costs. Chapter 4 is about e-mail alerts and useful e-mail alert services.
The next chapter is about building queries. This surprised me since I already tried all the services she explained before this chapter. Building a good query is usually the starting point after which you can decide to gather the result by RSS feed or e-mail alert. She explains this order of chapters by pointing out that you first need to know the tools of the information trapper’s toolbox before you learn what to trap, where to trap it and when. To me that was a little confusing, already started working. Maybe in the next book a note in the first chapter about this order of chapters. The chapter about building queries is again very well written with important tips and tricks as can be expected from this authority on search engines and their use. Made me curious about her book about search engines.
Chapter 6 is an important chapter about “Who’s linking to your site”. Information about who’s linking to your blog or website is internal information, external information is anything else. Knowing who is linking to your blog can enhance your content and services. Knowing what people think of your website can improve your writing and if know who is linking you can approach sites like these and ask them to link to your blog as well.This chapter discusses Google and Yahoo for finding out which inbound links are there to your blog. Technorati and the new kid Icerocket are discussed as well.
Chapter 7 is the core chapter of this book, it is also the largest chapter in comparison with the other chapters.It is all about trapping information from external sources, mainly search engines. This chapter desribes a lot of different kind of search engines.General search engines, news search engines, blog search engines, commercial search engines, trapping government information, monitoring international sites and some more. All engines are descrbed with how to build your query for that typical search engine , trapping information and possibilities. Kebberfegg is a special kind of power search tool, delivers a lot of information, is not yet very user friendly. It is developed by Researchbuzz. Chapter 8 is about trapping podcastst, video and images. Chapter 9 discloses the use of tags and conversations. A lot of information about flickr, del.icio.us and others. Chapter 10 addresses the issue of organizing all the information that is filling your inbox. This is an excellent howto for the use of Gmail. Chapter 11 has two examples in two case studies as well as how to get rid of information if it’s not to your liking.Chapter 12 is a very useful chapter about organizing all the information. Organizing the information on a single computer with google or yahoo desktop. The organization tools in browsers and online organizing options. Some of the software is not vailable anymore but using the keywords bookmark managers or information organizers in Google or Yahoo will keep you up to date with the newest possibilities in this field. The last chapter is about publishing your information.

In conclusion it’s a very good book, sometimes overwhelming with all the possibilities that are mentioned but on the other hand a lot of suggestions to try and see what fits your needs. So far the best book written about this subject. I tried to find the author on internet but she was hard to find. Finally after reading her book and using her advice a could finally trap a picture of her. I thought someone so famous as author who is hard to find on the internet besides her books, probably doesn’t want to be found. So buy the book and go search for yourself!