Library Announcements
Trial of New Online Database
PsycEXTRA from the American Psychological Association
supplements PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES with literature from outside
the peer-reviewed relm: newsletters, magazines, newspapers,
technical and annual reports, government reports, consumer
brochures, etc. The trial goes to October 1, 2004.
New eJournal
The Annual Reviews series of journals, previously only available for
recent years, may now be accessed back to the first volume for each
title. This includes the oldest titles in the series: volume one of
Annual Review of Biochemistry for 1932 and volume one of Annual Review
of Physiology for 1939.
In the last two issues of our newsletter, two EBM resources were highlighted:
Dynamed and InfoRetriever.
For this month‘s topic, we will review four OVID EBM databases.
The four OVID databases may be searched separately or all at one time.
They are the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the ACP Journal Club,
the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register,
and the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects.
- The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (COCH)
includes the full text of the regularly updated systematic reviews prepared by The Cochrane Collaboration.
COCH is unlike other "journal" or "serial" publications in that once a review is published,
it will appear in every issue thereafter.
The reviews are presented in two types:
- Complete reviews - Regularly updated Cochrane Reviews,
prepared and maintained by Collaborative Review Groups
- Protocols - Protocols for reviews currently being prepared (all include an expected date of completion).
Protocols are the background, objectives and methods of reviews in preparation.
- ACP Journal Club (ACP) editors screen the top clinical journals on a regular basis and identify studies
that are both methodologically sound and clinically relevant.
They write an enhanced abstract of the chosen articles and provide a commentary on the value of the article
for clinical practice.
- CCTR (formerly Cochrane Controlled Trials Register) is a bibliographic database of definitive controlled trials.
CCTR contains over 300,000 bibliographic references to controlled trials.
Cochrane groups and other organizations contribute their specialized registers;
and these registers — together with references to clinical trials identified in MEDLINE and EMBASE — form the CCTR database.
- The Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) contains critical assessments of systematic reviews
from a variety of medical journals.
DARE is produced by the expert reviewers of the National Health Services'
Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (NHS CRD) at the University of York, England,
and consists of structured abstracts of systematic reviews from all over the world.
Figure 1. Ovid Menu of Databases.
To gain access to the list of OVID EBM databases, select OVID or EBM Reviews (OVID)
in the scroll down menu on the Medical Library home page.
Either approach will take you to a menu screen in OVID (see Figure 1).
Select “All EBM Reviews - Cochrane DSR, ACP . . . ” as below.
When you search all, you may view all of the results together or by any of the four EBM databases.
Figure 2. Ovid Search Form.
In Figure 2, the term “breast cancer” is typed on the search line.
[As a reminder of the full searching capabilities of OVID, we call the “tools” icon to your attention.
Tools provide a thesaurus index to the complex terminology of medicine.
We encourage you to try this especially when searching MEDLINE in OVID.]
Figure 3. Ovid Search Results.
Figure 3 provides a summary at the top by hits within each of the four EBM databases,
followed by a title listing of each. The red arrow points to one specific topic review.
Figure 4. Cochrane Review in Ovid.
The last figure provides an expanded display of the Topic Review for
“Tamoxifen for early breast cancer.”
Featured PDA Resource -- Cochrane Abstracts in InfoRetriever
Figure 1.
Now that you know what the Cochrane Reviews are and how to find them on the Library web site,
here is how you can have all of the abstracts on your PDA for quick reference.
The Cochrane abstracts are available in InfoRetriever.
The best way to use them to answer a clinical question, such as
“should I use calcitonin to treat osteoporoses,” is to search on a word like
calcitonin or osteoporosis.
The search results are organized by categories which include treatment.
Since the Cochrane reviews are of clinical trials only,
the abstracts will all be found under either Treatment or Prevention.
Expand the appropriate category by clicking on the + sign. (Figure 1)
Figure 2.
Look for Cochrane abstracts by identifying the Cochrane symbol. (Figure 2)
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Scroll to find the conclusions which appear at the end of the abstract.
All Cochrane reviews are level of evidence (LOE) 1—the highest level.
