Conference on April 7, 2014

The MSC-CTRF is organizing a conference on the broader aspects of Sustainable Transportation at Concordia University on April 7, 2014. Transportation companies e.g. Via Rail, IBI groups, AECOM, CPCS, CN, Robert Trucking, Gaz Metro etc. will participate in the MSC-CTRF conference 2014. For the details of the conference, follow the link
http://www.ctrf.ca/StudentChapter/student_chapter_FutureEvents.html

You are invited to submit the abstract. Abstract Submission deadline February 24, 2014.

Examples of point-of-care tools your doctor is using: UpToDate vs. DynaMed

Health information is often difficult to navigate. Try a quick PubMed search and you’ll instantly get a sense of the number of published articles that are out there, and that’s not even everything (Tip: Filter your results using the article type “systematic reviews”–not “reviews”–to narrow down your results, and favour Cochrane reviews for their rigor; alternatively, use PubMed Clinical Queries).

Where am I going with this? Well, clinicians are busy people and it is obviously really important for them to stay on top of things. How are some ways they do this using McGill-licensed resources? These resources just happen to be available to the entire McGill community, so they are worth a look even if you are not a busy clinician.

Many clinicians are huge fans of UpToDate. It’s a really expensive resource and one we have great trouble affording, but it is definitely worth a look. It’s easy to use (designed for free text searching; look for your terms within articles using CTRL-F on a PC or CMD-F on a Mac if they’re not in the article title). Evidence is not always graded, although they are improving this.

An alternative to UpToDate and a nice option if you’re an avid mobile device user is DynaMed. We began licensing it this past spring, and one key advantage of it over UpToDate is that you can download all the content onto a mobile device, which means you don’t need an internet connection to view it. The app is a bit clunky but the content is there. Levels of Evidence are pretty consistently applied.

Health is important to just about all of us, so why not give these point-of-care tools a try?

Have Your Personal Library on Google Scholar

Scholar_libraryGoogle Scholar recently released a new goody – your personal online library at Google Scholar. On the result page, click “Save” below a search result to save it to your library. Click “My library” on the left to open your library. Of course, you can find the full text at any of these two stages when it is available either freely online or from your local library’s collection. To organize your articles in the library, you may click on a result in your library and add a label to it.