Tobacco Clinical Trials with Preschool Students

Today we went over the homework. The homework required a working knowledge of the NCBI website; the students are making good progress towards becoming bfg wonks.

During the remainder of class we messed around with different ways to limit Pubmed queries. A very good resource is the Pubmed help page (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=helppubmed.chapter.pubmedhelp). It has a nice series of tutorials on how to link search terms and how to limit searches within query fields. For example, the word tobacco, without limits, yields 46,068 papers, whereas limiting tobacco to the author field (tobacco[au]) yield only a paper by O. Tobacco. You can also use the limits pane on the search page to limit by field, publication type, publication date, etc. For example, there are 26 papers about clinical trials results with tobacco (usually secondhand smoke) and preschool children (click title for details). We also briefly compared Pubmed to scholar.google.com and the university's library web site. Another interesting comparison was results from scholar.google.com, www.google.com, and www.google.com/images. Google image searches are surprisingly good and finding pages with relevant text information about a subject.