Nutrition searching, medical searching, Medline

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A rbor N utrition G uide.

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MEDICAL AND MEDLINE SEARCHING

General medical search engines
Cancer searching
Specialised medical searching
Searching specific sites
MEDLINE
MEDICAL MATRIX

See also: Journals: general science journal lists

GENERAL MEDICAL SEARCH ENGINES

Pick of the crop

National Library of Medicine's MEDLINEplus
Expanded searching service, which now includes search engines and directories for health topics, medical terms, clearinghouses, data bases, news and other publications, health professional and hospital directories and, of course, MEDLINE itself!

Frontiers in Bioscience: list of bioscience search engines
Look down the page for BIOLOGY SEARCHES. No annotation but links.
The Big Hub
Formerly known as Sleuth, offers a variety of search engines focussed on specialised health topics. You can even search the Arbor Guide from here!

Achoo
Structured in a Yahoo-like way, with heirachical lists plus a non-Boolean search engine. "The Achoo directory is designed to be a comprehensive directory of Internet healthcare sites." Thousands of sites listed under basic, clinical and health business main categories.
Medical World Search
A specialised medical search engine that draws on other search engines, both medical and general (e.g. Alta Vista, Medline) but which offers parsing of medical terms. You can refine your search in stages and can also register so that it remembers things about your last searches. Allows Boolean terms and you can search from Thesaurus. This is a powerful engine but you need to be specific about what you want or the ruturn list can be overwhelming.
Cliniweb
Can search via either keywords or MESH- headings. Keywords resturn MESH headings also. Searches its own 2,500 site listings, as well as links to general web resources and MEDLINE through PUBMED. Can search in multiple languages (French, Spanish, German, Portugese, Russian).
Hardin Meta Directory of Internet Health Sources
"We list the sites that list the sites" .. Hardin Meta Directory pages have pointers to the most complete and frequently cited lists in each subject. Not a lot of them in each category, but useful nonetheless.
Harvard medicine www ("golgi")
Search WWW Virtual Library:Biosciences
Health on the Net: Medical Search
Non-profit organisation from Geneva focussed on health informatics for hospitals. No information on what their dB is, but returns web, mailing list and usenet results. (for nutrition, returned 50 or so urls). List of hospitals on the net.
HealthWorld - Complementary and literature search
Complementary medicine slant, commercial service. Offers pay-for-access complementary journals, free Medline/Internet combined searching (if you can get it to work properly, I haven't been able to!)
Einet Galaxy search
General and medical web searches possible. Also links to other non-medical searchers.
HealthOnline Community
A virtual community of health organisations with a general common thread of public or community health. Web site features resources on locating organisations, data bases, news etc.
HospitalWeb
List of hospitals with web sites, both in the USA and global hospital sites.
Medical Trends
Search engine specialised for health and science related sites.
MEDIS search
"Search facility indexing abstracts and articles from the worlds major medical sites. It is a manually written index updated on a monthly basis.from the worlds major medical sites. It is a manually written index updated on a monthly basis".
National Health Information Resource Center
Listing of health data resource sites, such as public health statistics DBs.
DIRLINE: National Libray of Medicine Directory of Health Organizations
Search for health organisations using this NLM data base. This is the nutrition listing, which returns information on address, contacts, description, but unfortunately no web or email listiings.
NlightN Find
Purports to offer a combined search mechanism for Medline, other health DBs and theInternet (usenet etc.). Not clear exactly how functional it is, but at present it is free. From Healthworld, who have a complementary medicine interest.
OMNI search
A major project to classify, catalog and assess medical resources on the Internet, being developed as a collaborative effort by a number of English medical libraries. It is still in its early stages, but promises to be a major resource for medical information technology.
Serial SEARCH Publications
Commercial site for searching and downloading full text from a variety of medical journals, which have an infectious disease focus. Features news of the week from the journals, plus you can refine search by keyword, and the results give you a short summary which you can click on for a longer one. This part of the service may soon be available by payment only.
The Six Senses
Aims to list and review medical Internet sites and present medical Internet news.
Yahoo what's new:Medicine
One of the better general sources of `new releases' as well as previous ones, listed by specialty using Yahoo's classification system. Includes lists of institutes and medical schools.
BioSites
A unversity library porject to list sites in boisciences selected by participating instutitions. Has search engine.

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CANCER SEARCH

Cancerlit : from Webdoctor
Returns weighted list of documents but with meaningless filenames. med
CancerNet search (NCI)
CancerNet
Oncolink: search engine
Large database of information on cancer. (weighted). Allows Boolean (otherwise treats phrases as individual OR words).

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SPECIALISED MEDICAL SEARCH ENGINES

American Indian Ethnobotany Database
Searchable data base on foods, drugs, and other natural products used by Native North American Peoples.
BioMedNet
Commercial full text service with guests allowed to search for abstracts using search engine from "various journal series.
BIO-JOURNALS: Bionet journals contents search
Around 180 journals contents pages are searchable here, mostly basic biological sciences.
Fedstats
"One Stop Shopping for Federal Statistics" with a search engine and index. The search engine allows sophisticated Boolean options. Results are from a range of US Federal government agencies, and might be anything from a press release or a web page, to an advertisement for a publication that you have to purchase.
Good Health Web: health organizations
Lists organisations concerned with health. Can search by web, email, gopher etc.
JOURNALS.At-HOME: journal search
"Atherosclerosis", "Hypertension", "Immunology", "Stroke", "J.Pathology", "Proc.Nat.Ac.Science". Has search engine.
Lightening hypertext of disease
Search engine for CD ROM on mechanisms of disease. Returns short summaries only, limited to 29 hits.
Medical Newsgroup Search
Search medical newsgroups. Limited Boolean and sub-string function.
NIH Grants
Information, policy and searching for NIH grants. There is also a NIH-Guide to Grants and Contracts Database

NIH Grants: gopher search engine
Nat.Health Information Centre: patient information
Single term search only. See above for organisation details.
NOAH
"New York Online Access to Health", public funded health information searcher, not just for local resources either. currently focused on nine main health topics: Aging, AIDS, Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Nutrition, Pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) and Tuberculosis (TB), but we plan to expand well beyond these categories." There is a good list of Spanish nutrition web sites as well.
Rxlist: search for drug names
Drug name index, returns only name of drugs if searched by generic, category. Allows wildcard+ searches.
Research-in-Surgery: gopher search
Returns list of obscure document titles. ? where from.
US Department of Health and Human Services search engines
Search databases sponsored by Office of the Secretary and other HHS agencies. Other specific search engines include:
Telemedicine Inform.Exchange: DB search
Good resource. A project of the Telemedicine Research Centre. Returns detailed hyperlinked list of research projects, bibliographic references, findinog organisations.

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OWN SITE MEDICAL SEARCH ENGINES

AMA (US) journals: search engine
All journals and news releases, back to 7/95. Retrieves abstract of article. Boolean searching including brackets.
Univ.of Calif.: search engine
"Biological, Agricultiral and Medical Internet Resources." Search by topic or keyword. A well annotated list with many subjects but not many entries under the medical ones but what it does have is well annotated. Can search by keyword or subject.
Columbia-Presbytarian Medical Centre search engine
"Biomedical Frontiers, Child Poverty News & Issues, Equipment & Core Facilities, Guide to Clinical Preventive Services,Health Sciences Library General Information, Health Sciences Library Special Collections. Health Sciences Library Archives, Health Sciences Reporter."But nothing under `nutrition' !
CRISP: Public health research gopher search
"CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) System is a major biomedical database containing information on research ventures supported by the United States Public Health Service". Returns non-alphabetical list of project descriptions, not results.
DARE: NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination
From the Univ.of York NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination a searchable data base in which "systematic reviews are identified from a variety of sources and assessed according to a set of quality criteria". The results of a search is a listing of hyperlinked records which describe the reviews - mostly journal articles but some others as well - in structured terms which may or may not include the outcome. There is also a health economics analysis data base.

"Doctor's Guide to the Internet": search
One of the major "virtual" medical centers on the Internet. This engine searches within that resource.
FAMILY-L search engine
Mailing list for academic family practice. This is their archives.
Health-A-to-Z
Annotated but not rated sites under but also across categories.
"Medscape" search
One of the major "virtual" medical centers on the Internet. Can combine the internal search with Medline searching if desired.
U.Michigan web pages search engine
An Excite engine, therefore concept and keyword search allowed. The results are displayed in order of displayed relevance weighting, but not clear how this is calculated. The urls are listed with only <title>contents.
Univ.Michigan Clearinghouse Guides: gopher search
Clearinghouse Guides are lengthy but not always up-to-date plain text documents, and this is the general search engine. It returns a list of relevant guides, not the urls themselves.
Search National Library Medicine (NLM) web site
Can search under medical topics/diseases or for information about their publications and products.
NIH Health Information Index
An alphabetically listed disease categorised list of which diseases are the concern of which NIH Institute, and links you to that Institute's home page (but not to material specific to that disorder. For that purpose, see the NIH web search engine).
CDC Search
Search Center for Disease Control's web documents.
CDC WONDER
Need to register first, and reregister if not used for a week. Access individual CDC data bases, not collectively. None are specifically nutritional. "Single point of access to a variety of CDC reports, guidelines, and even numeric public health data". Also list of health links.
NIH search
Search the National Institutes of Health web space. May return anything from lay resources of hjigh value to arcane and out of date research applications. Boolean searches allowed.
US Department of Health and Human Services search engine.
Allows Boolean searches. Refer also to: NIH search engine in next item below
NIH gopher
Starting point for the whole range of NIH library resources, including grants, literature, library etc. Has its own search engine, and some of the resources have their own as well.

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MEDLINE

MEDLINE GUIDES, lists

Lists of journals indexed in Medline
Gopher list of all journals which are abstracted for Medline.
Medline Guide
Information on (but not free use of!) Ovid, Grateful Med, PaperChase, Silver Platter, MeSH.
Medical Matrix listing
List of on-line access points, but not a complete account.

FREE MEDLINE ACCESS

Pick of the crop

HEALTHGATE: advanced search Medline and EMBASE
Does not require password. Advanced search offers and/or in limited fields, restriction of dates and language, age group, journal subset and article type. Returns unlimited results in batches of number you specify. Fetches abstracts en masse per page. Also has basic search.

Grateful Med (NLM)
The particular value of this MEDLINE search site from the National Library of Medicine (the organisation that produces MEDLINE) is that it incorporates PREMEDLINE, which allows access to very recent citations before they have had time to be incorporated into the main data base.go

AVICENNA: MEDLINE, AIDSLINE plus Avicenna sources
Registration required. Search by keyword(s) and article class (review, clinical trial etc.), allows Boolean and woldcards, but need to read the instructions lying behind the hyperlink at "Keywords" to know this.
Biomednet: Evaluated MEDLINE
Expert evaluations of selected articles and MeSH enhanced searches. Links to full text articles within the BioMedNet library. Medline back to 1959!
HEALTHYWORLD: Medline, AIDSline, Toxline
Boolean linked drop down choices for fields. These include the normal "Search In.." specifications, as well as choice and limiters for:
  • Data base years (back to 1966)
  • Language
  • Age groups
  • Article type (editorial, controlled clinical trial etc.)
  • Human or English only
HOUSECALL: Medline
Registration required. Uses using the Infotrieve service and has concept searching and help menus. Permits browsing of Mesh hierarchies.
MEDSCAPE: combined Medscape site with Medline
Need to register. Then free Medline, results returned as weighted list of titles (max.50), can only select one abstract at time.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE: Internet Grateful Med
National Library of Medicine free access to MEDLINE and a host of other literature data bases, including:
  • Toxicology
  • AIDS
  • Cancer clinical trials
  • bibliographic information.
The complete list includes:
  • MEDLINE, OLDMEDLINE (pre-1965, no abstracts), PREMEDLINE(immediate citations awaiting indexing), SDILINE (citations from the most recent complete month in MEDLINE)
  • HISTLINE (history of medicine)
  • AIDSLINE, AIDSTRIALS, AIDSDRUGS
  • HSRPROJ (Health Services Research Projects)
  • DIRLINE (Directory of resources providing information services)
  • HealthSTAR (Health Services, Technology, Administration and Research).

You can also access this service from its home page.

NETMEDICINE
PHYNET
Concept, spelling, Boolean, related, dictionary options. No registration required.
SILVERPLATTER (via Helix Galxo)
Search options allow Boolean selection of terms within specified MEDLINE categories. This service is provided by courtesy of Glaxo's Helix Virtual Centre, and may need to enter via registration page from Helix.com

SPECIALISED, UNUSUAL AND COST-BASED MEDLINE

PubMed
An extension of Medline searching in that it includes some citations outside or prior to Medline indexing. The information returned regarding Medline citations is however not quite as useful as as some of the exclusively Medline search engines. "PubMed is an experimental service of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed has been developed in conjunction with publishers of biomedical literature as a search tool for accessing literature citations and linking to their full-text versions at publishers' Web sites. PubMed searches the 8 million citations in MEDLINE supplemented by pre-Medline citations which do not yet have MeSH index terms and by citations supplied electronically by publishers."
NCBI Genbank
Medline Subset in Molecular Genetics (~700,000 citations). Returns abstracts and mesh
ENTREZ Medline subset
The MEDLINE citations available through WWW Entrez include all citations indexed under the MeSH term "Genetics" and all of its descendants, plus other smaller subsets having to do with molecular sequences. This subset contains approximately 1.3 million citations (out of MEDLINE's approximate 7 million), almost all closely related to molecular biology.
Entrez: matching specific text
Enter entire text sections and find the original Medline citation, butonly for molecular genetics sub-set.
AIDSLINE
OVID Medline (HCN)
Commercial service.
Nlight
Combination of Medline with various other DBs. Only get the citation, not the abstract until you pay (per item).
HealthWorld
A front end to Nlight. Gives access to Medline with a complex system of several stage searching, data from several sources (including Medline, web pages, Usenet, reference books etc.). Has limited Boolean searching, web pages and usenet articles in small numbers. I have found it interesting but hard to comprehend the finer points of the search engine.

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MEDICAL MATRIX

MEDICAL MATRIX is the main listing of medical Internet resources currently available world wide. It has built up as the result of several years of postings to m-matrix, the premier mailing list for the announcement of new Internet web sites. It is an effort of the American Medical Information Association. The sites below have both the raw mailing list archives and a much more organised collection of site listings, some of which have been reviewed.

Pick of the crop

MEDICAL MATRIX: Main site
Catalog of medical resources, together with search engine for the site, makes this the best starting point for medical Internet resources. Some have been reviewed.

MEDICAL MATRIX: full text version (Hancock/Malet)
A very long plain text listing of some major sites under the many topics into which m-natrix has now classified medical resources (based on Lee Hancock's original) Also appears at: gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu:70/00/inetdirsstacks/medclin%3Amalet.

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