Biomedical Engineering BME 120/220                                                  Julia Gelfand

Quantitative Physiology: Sensory Motor Systems                                   Science Library 228

Fall 2006                                                                                              949-824-4971

                                                                                                            jgelfand@uci.edu

 

You will have several Problem Based Learning (PBL) sessions where you will be conducting literature searches and then writing up case reports.  In order to participate in the group discussions and then to successfully write up your report, you will need to become information literate with several information products and databases that contain the most relevant information.

 

Background Sources:

  1. Subject Guides - Several subject guides have been prepared and support the core literature that is most relevant to this course
    1. Subject Guide for Biomedical Engineering
    2. Grunigen Medical Library Guide
    3. Subject Guide for Medicine
    4. Subject Guide for Biology

Recommended Databases (found by using ANTPAC or the E-Resources Locator (and using database) or the entry on the Subject Guides:

  1. PubMed - this is the most comprehensive indexing of clinical medicine, allied health and related disciplines - it is from the National Library of Medicine and known as Medline.  Searching it requires some skill - you will be searching by keyword and can combine terms with AND, OR, NOT (always in capitals).  By clicking on "Limits" you can restrict the search to a type of literature, by language, age group of the population being studied, type of article and other conditions of the output.

 

      When you display the output, it is in reverse chronology - most recently added to the database comes out first.  If you pulldown the    display menu and select "Citation" you will get the abstract and the MESH (medical subject headings) t  terms which will give you           an indication of why you retrieved the citation.  It will also have icons sometimes indicating if the article is available fulltext or you can click on the UC e-Links to determine whether access is available to UCI users.

 

Some hints for PBL 1 - recommended search strategy includes:

 

  1. Web of Science - this is a large database - you will want to conduct a "General Search" and "de-click" the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index and ONLY SEARCH the SCIENCE CITATION INDEX under the "Citation Databases."  Since this database goes back to 1900 you will want to change the years of coverage to something more manageable like 2000 or 2002.  Enter a similar search strategy and then click on the authors' names.  You will see the abstract and the list of "Cited References" (older articles cited by these authors - may be relevant) and "Times Cited" corresponding to newer articles which have cited this contribution.  You may want to review both of those lists and the "Related Articles" also noted.

 

Additional Hints: