Category: academics
-
Unreliable patients most likely to ask for SMS
Here’s an article that may be of interest from the E-Health Insider website titled “Unreliable Patients Most Likely to ask for SMS Reminders“. While I tend to support the use of technology to help people, for some reason, this aritcle seems to rub me the wrong way. I think it’s the word “unreliable” – there’s…
-
Open Access Publishing – power to the people
There’s an interesting commentary in this week’s BMJ titled “Open access publishing: Too much oxygen” by Jeffrey Aronson. Aronson’s basic argument is to temper support of open access publishing. He also believes that the current model of publishing is working well pointing to the number of different journals sprouting up. Aronson argues: We need to…
-
New articles on evaluation in eHealth/health informatics
I came across two new articles on evaluation in health informatics. Ammenwerth E, Shaw NT. Bad health informatics can kill – is evaluation the answer? Methods of Information in Medicine 2005;44:1-3. Ammenwerth E, de Keizer N. An inventory of evaluation studies of information technology in health care: Trends in evaluation research 1982 – 2002. Methods…
-
Strategies for Searching EMBASE
A recently published article by Haynes et al (2005) studied how to optimally search EMBASE (see below for citation information). For those interested in searching for articles on EMBASE, you need to consider the factors of a search: Sensitivity: The proportion of high quality articles retrieved; Specificity: The proportion of low quality articles not retrieved;…
-
Learn how to search EMBASE better
Brian Haynes, Monika Kastner, Nancy Wilczynski, and the Hedges Team at McMaster University published this interesting and useful article on how to better search EMBASE. FYI – “EMBASE is a comprehensive and international bibliographic database renowned for its extensive coverage of the drug and biomedical literature” (EMBASE.com). EMBASE is similar to the National Library of…
-
Google Scholar: Don’t believe the hype?
When I heard about Google Scholar a few months back, I was initially excited at the prospect of being able to search academic/research references quickly, with the power and ease of using Google. Here’s the description from Google: “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts…
-
Update on systematic review – evaluation frameworks
The systematic review for health informatics/ehealth evaluation frameworks continues slowly. I just realized that there may be another potential source of data that I never considered previously – academic websites. Let me explain… So far, my search strategy has been as follows: Electronic indices: Medline & Embase University of Toronto library catalogue Manual search of…
-
Web downloads as predictors for citation impact
I came across an interesting web article that compared the number of downloads of a scientific article. The article is somewhat dense with a number of figures and formulas. Honestly, I don’t completely understand it all, but I get the gist of the article (I think). Here’s a quick recap. The authors wanted to know…