Search challenge 8
With the ever-increasing growth of the medical literature, as well as seemingly increasing public scrutiny of the happenings at our medical institutions, it seems like finding good ways to "track" the publications of an institution and also how it's being mentioned in the popular media are challenges that health sciences librarians are being called to help address.
So, for this week, a multi-part search challenge:
- What strategies do you use to track what people from your institution (hospital, medical school, etc) are publishing (e.g. what databases, terms, other resources)?
- How do you track mentions of your institution in the popular media?
- How often do you update such searches?
- Who "needs" this information at your institution?
So, for this week, a multi-part search challenge:
- What strategies do you use to track what people from your institution (hospital, medical school, etc) are publishing (e.g. what databases, terms, other resources)?
- How do you track mentions of your institution in the popular media?
- How often do you update such searches?
- Who "needs" this information at your institution?
Labels: search challenge
posted by Becky at 7:56 AM
2 Comments:
To track institutional publications, I have a PubMed saved search set up for individuals' last names and initials (SMITH AB OR JONES CD, etc.); and just to have both a belt and suspenders, I also have a saved search set up to track our institution's name in the affiliation field (MPOW[AD]). I have set up PubMed to run updates on these searches weekly. To track mentions of my institution in the media, I have set up a Google Alert, and Google sends me emails with the relevant links to the mentions; this is ongoing, and after set-up, requires no additional work on my part. The people who need this are the staff at my institution who are publishing, as well as our communications department.
I have set up feeds from PubMed and CINAHL with all the variations of my organization's name. I live in a fairly small city with a unique name, so I've also added feeds for the city name as well. This is usually enough to catch anything anybody in my institution or the other local institutions has published. Given the large number of staff and steady turnover, I don't try to search by individual names.
For news and general info, I have similar searches set up in google news, google blog search, topix.net and several other sites. I also highly reccomend www.libworm.com as a great source. You can run searches on a large number of sources simultaneously, and many of them are healthc care related.
I notify people when I find their articles have been published. If I find media stories about my organization, I usually notify our PR department.
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