Keeping Up with the Literature: Strategies for Busy People

Sports Rounds

March 12, 2009

Harsh Reality

ORTraining Room

Clinic Lectures

Eat? Sleep? Exercise? Family

Travel Research Classwork

Games Practice Teaching

Social Life Administrative Tasks

Personal Hygiene?

24 Hours

The Problem

Even if we select < 10%

How do you do it?

4 Primary Tasks

1) Finding Important Papers

2) Organizing the material

3) Consuming the material

4) Retaining the material

Efficient Ways to Stay Up on What’s New (Finding it)

• My NCBI

• eTOC

• Share the Dirty Work

• Visit the Ortho Library on a Monthly Basis

My NCBI

• NCBI = National Center for Biotechnology Information

• Division of NIH & the National Library of Medicine

• Administrates the PUBMED… system

My NCBI

• My NCBI is a place where you have a unique account to save your searches

• Offers a service that lets you know when new articles come available related to one of your searches

• Can search on topics, people, journals…

• Also has two bibliography services

eTOC

• Electronic Table of Contents

• Nearly all journals/publishers have them

• Can sign up with one stop shopping with major publishers

• Get an email when the journal is published (in print… online earlier)

Takes you tothe journalsite; musthave access orthen go to Hardin / PubMed

Share the Dirty Work

• Take turns compiling a list of recent papers that you feel are important

• A group of 4 to 8, only need to search once every month or two if weekly or 1-2 times per year if monthly

• Provide links to papers

Visit the Ortho Library

• Large number of journals

• Can scan TOCs pretty quickly if visit monthly

• Identify papers of interest

• Use PubMed if available online

Organization

• Reading Folder (pdfs or links)

• My NCBI collection

• E-Mail Folder for my NCBI or eTOC mailings with hits of interest

• Endnote/Refworks

• Print & file it

Organization

• Set aside time

• 5 AM… get something done prior to checking your email

• Have a paper in your briefcase, backpack… whatever for times when you are forced to wait

Consuming the Material

• Read the Abstract

• Glance at Figures

• Read the Conclusions paragraph

Consuming the Material

• Read the Abstract

• Last Paragraph of the Introduction

• Scan methods, results topically

• Figures & Tables

• Read first paragraph(s) of Discussion

• Scan topical sentences of Discussion

• Read Conclusions Paragraph(s)

Retaining What You Read

• Use it

• Share it (discussion with colleague, mentor, team, journal club)

• Develop a Reading Journal (i.e, annotated bibliography)

• OneNote

• EndNote/RefWorks