You’ve probably heard the claim that the body of scientific knowledge is growing at an alarming rate – doubling every 9 years is a recent estimate. It’s easy to hear your colleagues chatting about recent publications as if they’re the new Taylor Swift song (something you’ve never even heard of, unless you’re a Carley) and feel overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task of keeping up-to-date.

It feels a bit like this:

Using FOAM resources and social media like Twitter is one way to feel less overwhelmed – people like the awesome Minh Le Cong (who seems to have an infinite amount of time) tweet links to interesting papers, acting as a first line sieve to identify the things you might be interested in, while resources like EMLit of Note, Critical Care Reviews, Life in the Fast Lane’s Research & Reviews and the Bottom Line share appraisals of the articles themselves. At St Emlyn’s we try to do our bit too, with our regular Journal Club blog posts. Of course we would never suggest that exclusive use of blogs and podcasts should replace your own reading – it’s important that you take the time to read research and appraise it yourself, we’re just here to help point you in the direction we think is interesting/relevant/useful (and to help with critical appraisal tips).

If you’ve got a spare couple of hours, check out these FOAM legends talking about the challenges of social media/life balance at SMACC 2013 and have a think about how social media can support our professional development. Lots of wisdom here.

At the extreme end of the scale there’s Scott Weingart, who reads a zillion articles a day. We all know he’s superhuman and someone we should aspire to emulate so you might also want to listen to this podcast on how he gets things done!

But there are a couple of other things we do at St Emlyn’s to keep track of what’s been published – the raw, unappraised literature – and we thought it might help you if we share them.

PubMed Alerts

Full credit for this goes to the legend that is Rick Body – the only reason I know how to do this is because he taught me! Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up personalised PubMed email alerts. I’ve included Rick’s preferences and my own journal list (which includes a few additional paeds-focussed journals).

Go to www.pubmed.com

Set up a personal account and sign in (sign into NCBI – top right of the screen. You can sign in with a google account or create a separate account for PubMed)

Paste a search strategy into the search bar…

Rick’s search strategy

((((((((“Emergency medicine journal : EMJ”[Journal]) OR “Annals of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine”[Journal]) OR “The American journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “The Journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “European journal of emergency medicine : official journal of the European Society for Emergency Medicine”[Journal]) OR “Resuscitation”[Journal]) OR “Injury”[Journal]) OR “Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA”[Journal]

Nat’s search strategy

((((((((“Pediatric emergency care”[Journal] OR “Pediatric critical care medicine : a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies”[Journal] OR “Archives of Disease in Childhood”[Journal] OR “Emergency medicine journal : EMJ”[Journal]) OR “Annals of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine”[Journal]) OR “The American journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “The Journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “European journal of emergency medicine : official journal of the European Society for Emergency Medicine”[Journal]) OR “Resuscitation”[Journal]) OR “Injury”[Journal]) OR “Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA”[Journal]

Simon takes a different approach and runs several searches with different time intervals to space out different areas of interest. A selection of these search strategies is shown below. The searches based on trial design and subject headings often bring up relevant papers in journals that you might not consider to be ‘core’ EM journals.

(emergency medicine) AND randomized controlled trial

(emergency medicine) AND evidence based medicine

(((((((((((((“annals of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “academic emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “emj”[Journal]) OR “ema”[Journal]) OR “american journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “Resuscitation”[Journal]) OR “European journal of emergency medicine : official journal of the European Society for Emergency Medicine”[Journal]) OR “Injury”[Journal]) OR “The Journal of trauma”[Journal])) OR “Pediatric emergency care”[Journal]) OR “Clinical pediatric emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “International journal of emergency medicine”[Journal]) OR “Emergency medicine clinics of North America”[Journal]

(emergency medicine) AND head injury

gestalt (Ed – no really he does have a search strategy just on Gestalt)

(emergency department) AND acute coronary syndrome

(ophthalmology) AND emergency medicine

Within the St.Emlyn’s team the slightly different approaches is a strength and you may want to team up with colleagues to ensure that your ‘group’ covers the breadth of interest you want.

Hit “Search”, then when the results come up you’ll see an option below the search bar to save the search.

This should bring up a screen that gives you the option of having the search repeated automatically and the titles emailed to you however regularly you want them to be.

Once you’ve set it up, you’ll know everything that’s published in an Emergency Medicine journal. Have a look through the options – I get a daily digest of everything published (maximum 200 items although there have never been 200 in one day!) with abstracts included where possible.

The downside of this approach is it’s an email to read every day/week/month – sometimes there are two articles, sometimes a lot more.

Archive the emails. You may want to keep track of the pubmed searches. There are lots of ways to do this. You can simply create an email folder and store them there (create an inbox rule to move them automatically). Simon likes to send them to evernote and keep them in a folder there for easy access, archive and searching (see Scott Weingart’s awesome post on Getting Things Done to explain how and why you should do this).

RSS Feed Readers

Journals also produce RSS feeds (as do websites with regularly updated content, like news sites and blogs).

Below is a video I created for the Social Media workshop at SMACC Gold which shows how you can use an RSS Feed Reader like Feedly to collate all the RSS feeds you are interested in in one place. The advantage is you can read it all at once – the downside is you have to actually log in and do it!

If RSS feeds still seem totally alien to you we’ll be offering face-to-face support at the Social Media workshop at SMACC US in Chicago – come along to Join the FOAM Party!

Do you have any other ideas on how to stay on top of the published literature? We’d love to hear them!

Nat

Other resources from people we know (or believe) use similar strategies

Listen to Scott Weingart describe a path to insanity here http://emcrit.org/podcasts/path-to-insanity/

Muse on how Rob MacSweeney makes it happen at critical care reviews

Keep up to date with Cliff Reid at Resus.me

Intensivists – make your way to Wessex and the Bottom Line

Get Skeptical at the SGEM

Meet Ryan Radecki at EMLit of Note

Minh (of course) at the PHARM



Cite this article as: Natalie May, "JC: Drinking From the Firehose – Keeping Up with the Literature," in St.Emlyn's, February 25, 2015, https://www.stemlynsblog.org/keeping-up-with-literature/ How you can support St Emlyn's Follow us on facebook

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