Integrating the Internet into Your Clinical Practice
http://www.fpen.org/allina
May 8, 1998

Search engines, which you will be using in the next hands-on exercise, are one way to find information on the web. However, since search engines are commercial web sites that increasingly are trying to generate revenue and given that for many searches they retrieve too many hits to be useful, a better place to start may be either a meta-site or a directory. Although some discussions of these resources actually distinguish between the two, we will refer to meta-sites or directories as one and the same.

Meta-sites or directories can be defined as web sites that provide organized access to Internet resources. They usually include pointers to selected web sites on a particular topic. The especially useful sites will have evaluated the sites they are pointing to based on clearly defined criteria and provided brief annotations on what the sites contain. Another characteristic of a good meta-site or directory is the fact that it is continually updated and rarely includes dead links. Many of the search engines will not be as updated in this regard as a meta-site or directory.

Practice finding information on some of the more well known web meta-sites or directories.

Medical Matrix

One of the premier meta-sites in the medical field is the Medical Matrix web site sponsored by Slack, Inc. The Medical Matrix Project is devoted to posting, annotating, and continuously updating Internet clinical medicine resources. Pages are organized by disease/specialty or by type of resource. Although a registration procedure is required initially, the web site is free-of-charge. There are some links to fee-based resources, but many links are to free resources.
Connect to this site, http://www.medmatrix.org and explore some of the areas of your choosing.

Next, look for the links to the Medline database, many of them are free, under the Literature heading. Finally, look at some of the links to CME resources under the Education heading.

HealthWeb

HealthWeb provides links to specific, evaluated information resources on the web selected by librarians and information professionals at leading academic medical centers in the Midwest. Selection emphasizes quality information aimed at assisting health care professionals as well as consumers in meeting their health information needs.

Connect to HealthWeb (http://www.healthweb.org) and select Subjects. Note that not all the specialties listed have been developed yet. Choose a topic of your choice and investigate some of the resources.

MedWeb

MedWeb is a comprehensive, well-supported set of web links in the medical disciplines, owned and maintained by Emory University. It is organized a little differently than the other directory sites you have explored.

Connect to MedWeb, http://www.cc.emory.edu/WHSCL/medweb.html.
Click on Keyword Index
Scroll down to Electronic Publications and click on By subcategory Look for links to electronic journals in cardiology. You can also search alphabetically by journal title.

Yahoo:Health

Yahoo!, which you may already be familiar with, is a directory site that contains organized information on a wide range of topics. It is not a search engine as many people refer to it as. Yahoo does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any of the information or advertisements that it provides links to. It also is much better for more consumer-oriented, or lay-level searches in the medical field. It is possible to select only the Health (and within Health, only the Medicine) portion of the huge Yahoo! database. This directory is especially easy to use, which is probably why it is so popular.

Connect to Yahoo:Health (http://www.yahoo.com/Health) and conduct a search for information on Alternative Therapy resources, specifically Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture.