Savvy Searcher

MD Consult

Last spring, Himmelfarb Library added a new database to its collection. MDConsult is a medical information website that provides access to medical information for health professionals. MDConsult emphasizes full-text information and includes textbooks, journal articles, practice guidelines, drug information, and patient education materials.

To use MDConsult, you should sign-up for a login name and password at the Reference Desk. This allows you to create your own individual MDConsult account, within Himmelfarb Library's institutional account. Using your login and password, you can use MDConsult from any computer with Internet access simply by accessing MDConsult's webpage http://www.mdconsult.com.

Please remember to click on "Log Off" when you are finished using MDConsult. Because MDConsult is a shared resource at GWUMC, it is important to definitively end your session to allow another person to log on to MDConsult, and so that you will be able to access MDConsult when you need it.

Searching MDConsult: All Areas

You can search MDConsult for medical information in several ways. You can choose to search all of MDConsult at once, or you may choose to search a single area (ex: Reference Books or Journal Literature). To search all of MDConsult at once, use the universal search form.

The universal search form displays the areas to be searched in a column on the left side of the screen, and the search form on the right side of the screen.

You can enter your search terms in the Subjects boxes and use the pull-down menus to the left of the boxes to specify whether you want to use "and," "or," or "exclude" to connect the terms. In the search entered above, you will retrieve items that contain the term "diabetes" as well as either the term "adolescent" or the term "teenager." If you changed the pull-down menu to "exclude" you would retrieve items with the term "diabetes" that did not mention adolescents or teenagers.

In addition to using multiple subject boxes and the pull-down menus to construct searches, you can enter multiple search terms in a single search box connecting the terms with "and," "or", or "not" (Note: when using a single search box, use "not" rather than "exclude"). For instance, the search on diabetes and adolescents/teenagers could also be entered as follows:

diabetes and (adolescent or teenager)

Truncation

When entering search terms, you can use truncation in order to find all terms that begin with the same letters. MDConsult does some truncation automatically and will find common alternate endings and plurals for words including "e," "s," "ies," and "ing."

For additional truncation in MDConsult, two truncation symbols are available. The question mark (?) is used for single character truncation, and an asterisk (*) is used for unlimited truncation. For example, the search term "adolescen?" will retrieve items that contain the word adolescent, while the search term "adolescen*" will retrieve adolescent, adolescents, adolescence, adolescency, adolescentium, adolescenthood, and adolescentis.

MDConsult requires that search terms used with truncation symbols contain at least three characters.

Searching MDConsult: Journal Literature

MDConsult's Journal Literature area contains the MEDLINE, AIDSLINE, CANCERLIT, and HealthSTAR databases, as well as additional articles from MDConsult's full-text database.

In addition to searching using the Subjects boxes as in the universal search, the MDConsult screen for searching journal literature provides additional methods for focusing your search.

The Date of Publication pull-down menu allows you to select a year range for journal articles. The date ranges permit you to select a set of recent years (1999-Present, 1990-Present, etc.), or to select an older year range (1966-1979).

The Sort Results option allows you to specify the order in which you would like to view your search results. The default setting in this area is "Full Text/Relevancy" which means that all full-text items will be displayed as the first results of your search. The full-text results will be sorted from most to least relevant. Following the full-text holdings, remaining items will be listed. These remaining items will also be sorted by relevancy.

The Sort Results option can be reset so that search results are sorted by Relevancy where the most relevant articles are displayed first whether or not they are available in full-text, or by Publication Date so that most recent articles are displayed first.

The MDConsult Thesaurus is set by default to the "on" position. The thesaurus matches your term to closely related terms and synonyms and searches on all terms. For instance, if you entered the term "insulin dependent diabetes," the database would also search for equivalent terms such as "juvenile onset diabetes" and "brittle diabetes." If you reset the thesaurus feature to "off," MDConsult will search for the terms only as you enter them and not search using synonyms.

Some MDConsult search features can be useful for locating articles that are more relevant to your search request, but will eliminate some full-text articles available through MDConsult. The Clinical Focus and Study Subjects settings can be used to narrow your search to find articles of a particular type or about a specific study group, but some full-text articles will not be retrieved if you use these settings. This happens because very recent full-text articles do not yet have Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assigned to them, and the Clinical Focus and Study Subjects settings use information stored in MeSH terms to identify relevant articles.

Clinical Focus allows you to choose from a list of common subheadings to specify articles about an aspect of a disease or condition such as therapy, etiology, diagnosis, or prognosis. Clinical Focus also allows you to select common publication types to describe the type of article that you're looking for: literature reviews, opinions, trials, or Cochrane reviews.

Article Study Subjects permits you to specify age groups and whether you're looking for studies conducted on humans or animals. Selecting an age group and specifying "human" may help you find articles that are more clinically relevant by excluding laboratory research results and research about groups outside your topic area.

To really focus your search, you may search by specific fields. MDConsult allow you to specify specific fields to search by using field codes in square brackets after a term. For instance, you may search for "diabetes mellitus," when it appears as a MeSH term rather than just anywhere in the article by typing:

diabetes mellitus[sh]

You can also use a field code to specify which of the available databases you would like to search. "mdcsource" is the field code for the source database, while the databases available are represented as MEDLINE (MI), AIDSLINE (AL), CANCERLIT (CL), and HealthSTAR (HS). To indicate that you want to search MEDLINE only, you would type:

MI[mdcsource]

Using MDConsult Effectively

MDConsult is a convenient and valuable reference tool, particularly when you cannot be in the Library. However, MDConsult cannot provide in-depth information on every topic. You may need to supplement the information that you find in MDConsult with additional print or electronic resources. For assistance locating specific information or for a source recommendation, don't hesitate to contact the Library's Reference desk at 202-994-2850 or library@gwumc.edu.