Searching high level sources first (May 17, 2006). Category: Information searching

When you have to perform a search for the evidence, it pays to look at high level sources first. A recent discussion on the Evidence Based Health mailing list produced a nice list of these resources.

• Clinical Evidence www.clinicalevidence.com/ceweb/conditions/index.jsp
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/crddatabases.htm
• Dr. Companion www.drcompanion.com/
• DynaMed www.dynamicmedical.com
• Joanna Briggs Institute Clinical Information Service (JBI CIS) www.joannabriggs.edu.au/cis/gu_home.php
• OT seeker www.otseeker.com/
• Occupational Therapy Critically Appraised Topics (OTCATS) www.otcats.com/
• MD Consult www.mdconsult.com
• McMaster Online Ratiing of Evidence (MORE) hiru.mcmaster.ca/more/
• PARADIGM database bookstore.phf.org/product_info.php?cPath=44&products_id=123
• Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters www.infopoems.com/
• Physicians Information and Education Resource pier.acponline.org/index.html
• Physiotherapy Evidence Database www.pedro.fhs.usyd.edu.au/
• Prodigy www.prodigy.nhs.uk/
• UpToDate www.uptodate.com

Dean Giustini has some nice summaries at

• weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/sourcesofevidence.pdf and
• weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/EBMJan20_06.pdf

It's not a high level source, but someone pointed out a natural language query system for Medline

• Ask Medline askmedline.nlm.nih.gov/ask/ask.php

Note: some additional resources added on May 30, 2006.