After completing
Thing 12, you will have:
-done a simple search on PubMed, and set up an alert on My Library which
will inform you of new relevant articles as they are indexed.
Why don’t I just set
up an alert direct via PubMed?
·
Using My Library will mean that all updates from
your favourite feeds and your PubMed alerts will come in the one email.
Part one: doing
the search
Firstly, go to the PubMed homepage:
We are going to use three search lines when setting up our
alert, so click on the ‘Advanced’ search link:
We are interested in finding anything that discusses
- information skills
- or information literacy
- in
a health
environment.
So that’s (‘information skills’ OR ‘information literacy’) AND health
We’re not going to
use MESH headings, but we are going to use the indexing list.
In the first search box, type information skills then click ‘Show indexing list’ – the list of indexing
terms will be displayed.
BEWARE!!!
this is not the same as a thesaurus
function; it just lets us jump into the (alphabetical) indexing list at this
particular point. We are going to have
to look elsewhere if we want to add related terms
Use the Ctrl key and the mouse to select
information skills, information skills
instruction, and information skills
training – note that they are automatically added to the first line of the
PubMed Advanced Search Builder using the Boolean operator ‘OR’.
Click ‘Hide index list’ to clean the page up a bit, then go
to the next search box; we are going to search for information
literacy as a related term;
- Use the drop down menu to
change the operator from “AND” to ‘OR’ and type information
literacy into the search box
Display the indexing list for our second line, and using the
Ctrl key and mouse again select information
literacy, information literacy education, information literacy instruction,
and information literacy skills (you
will need to scroll down the list a little for this one...
Click ‘Hide index list’ to clean
the page up a bit, then go to the next search box
Lastly, type in the third part of our search – health.
No need to change the ‘AND’ as the Boolean operator when adding the line
this time.
Then click the Search button...
We have a lot of
hits (222 on the day of writing this!) but don’t worry –we’re setting this up
to receive updates, not to go through everything that’s already there in PubMed.
Part two: adding
the RSS feed to My Library
Click on the RSS icon at the top of the screen; you’ll get a
display box like this:
- Set the number of items to be displayed (15 is the default) and
- don’t worry about naming it – you’ll be doing that in My Library
- Then
click the ‘Create RSS’ button.
You get a second display box that looks like this:
- Click on the orange XML button , then copy the URL of the feed
- Go to My Library; click the blue ‘Add feed’ button
- Paste the URL into the box
- Give it a name that will remind you what the search was about
- Then
click ‘Add feed’ underneath the URL box, just like we did with the RSS feeds we
added in the last post
You will now get your updates as part of your My Library
email!
! TIP: Remember we set a number of
hits we wanted to see in our update? My
Library only shows the first few by default, but clicking on ‘List all’ when
logged in to My Library will show you the number that you asked for...
