Learning tools and search engine ranking for Medicos

Recently read the Latest edition of Journal of Health informatics in developing countries. Specifically, Search engines : a study of nine search engines in four categories by Dallas Knight (Health Informatics Programme University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand). This study’s objective was to determine how search engines within different categories compare, and to look at features and trends of search engines that are commonly used for queries by both health consumers and professionals.

The query terms used for this study are

• Ulcerative colitis
• Benign positional vertigo
• Pleomorphic rhabdomyosarcoma
• “online tool” for help with depression
• exercise after bowel cancer operation

Evaluation of the first ten sites for each scenario in each search engine included relevance, usefulness, usability of sites, and quality of health information evaluation.

Search engines within the general category (Google, SearchYahoo!) performed best overall. Meta search engines (Dogpile, Jux2) also performed well with vertical search engines (Healia, Kosmix, Healthline) next. Health portals (Revolution Health, WebMD) produced relevant useful results for common terms, but not for unusual query terms.

Other important medical education and learning tools the study talks about include

• Custom built Search engines ( eg Google, Rollyo and EureksterSwiki )
• Blog sites, wikis and podcasts
• social bookmarking with Del.icio.us and Digg.com
• RSS site feeds read by aggregators or emails
• Yahoo Pipes! for channelizing information

The few services and tools it missed include,

• Zotero firefox extension and Evernote web clipper - for online research notes
• Ning for community building
• Youtube(eg.youtube.com/medicaleducation) and Medicalvideos.us for videos.
• Twitter for sharing updates
• Docstoc and Scribd for document search
• Freemind for brain mapping

I think i shall now close this list or i shall be spending hours trying to compile a complete list. Anyways, most of the useful tools for medical education and learning have been mentioned here. If you can think of any more study tools or services, kindly add them in the comments.

Read the complete study Here

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