Medical professionals must be up-to-date in their fields of interest all the time as that is how they can give the best treatment to the patient. But being up-to-date is not easy, it takes time and effort as well. Many physicians spend their precious time in the library once or twice a week and try to review a few journals. Now, in the era of web 2.0, we have unique tools with which we can keep ourselves up-to-date more easily and efficiently.



The aim of this e-course is to show you which tools you can use to facilitate your work and help you to learn how to use efficiently these services. RSS, third-party Pubmed tools and other services are all designed to help medical professionals in their work, practice or research.

Let's see what kind of tools can help you follow the literature of your field of interest easily. A few examples may represent the power of RSS in tracking the medical literature. The other steps of this e-course focus on more services and tools that are easy to use to keep yourself up-to-date.

RSS or a web feed (news feed) is a data format used for providing users with regularly changing web content. Users can subscribe to the feeds of news-related sites, blogs or other online publishers that syndicate their content as an RSS Feed.


The logo of RSS

The 2-7 steps of this e-course focus on RSS and how medical professionals can benefit from these services.

Feed readers save you time and effort by monitoring sites and resources, and providing real-time updates to one location. There are desktop-based and web-based feed readers and you can also use your web browser to follow feeds of websites.

PubMed is the main search engine of life sciences and the most important online tool for the majority of physicians. Most of physicians and scientists keep going back to PubMed from time to time and do a search for their fabourite terms to see whether there are new additions to the database. But you could receive your PubMed updates via e-mail or RSS by using the Save Search function. You don’t have to search again and again, just sit back and wait for the next e-mail containing the newest articles in your field of interest.


The main page of Pubmed.gov

These tools are based on PubMed but try to open new ways in searching for different scientific/medical terms. For example, PubMed Reader is a free web-based research program for displaying PubMed / Medline search results on an individual basis. It means you can create your own up-to-date Medline and PubMed literature search.

There are more and more sites with the purpose to let users follow a specific field of interest easily. Google Alerts and FaveBot, among others, help you how to follow the literature efficiently.

Google Alerts provides e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your query or subject. It means you receive an e-mail notification whenever something happens in your field.

Tagging is one of the most important and popular features of web 2.0. From the informational point of view, there is a huge difference between focusing on genetics in an article and to just mention the word genetics in another post. That is why tags help you how to find content absolutely relevant to your needs.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English



If you want to track your field of interest that way, try del.icio.us. It is a social bookmarking service that lets you save your bookmarks online and share them with others. The tagging tools they use help you keep track of the most popular items and articles in your field of interest.


The main page of del.icio.us