Why does everyone expect PubMed to be like Google?  Is Lexis/Nexus like
Google?  CINAHL?  Web of Science? Not at all.  Just because PubMed is free,
doesn't mean you don't have to learn how to search it.  The sequence data
at NCBI is free as well and I can tell you from experience that it is not
so easy to search either.  Because the subject is complex.  In any field of
study, not just science or medicine, if you need a thorough search, you
will need the help of a librarian or some other expert searcher to find out
about all possible databases as well as search them.
Too many students think that because they can find music or friends or
videos on the Internet, they are experts.  But the number who don't even
know about bibliographic software that will make their paper writing easier
is well over 75% in my experience.
The improvements in searching the medical literature since I started my
career are amazing.  I realize I'm dating myself, but when I started I had
to take a 3 day course to learn how to search MEDLINE (and I had to travel
to Ottawa in January, but that is another story).  The current PubMed
interface is better than Grateful Med, and there are various programmers at
NCBI trying to create new interfaces to make searching easier.
And we haven't even mentioned the sorts of false drops you can get with a
Google search!  At least it all makes for an exciting job.
Margaret

Margaret Henderson, B.Sc., M.L.I.S.
Research Services Librarian
Tompkins-McCaw Library for Health Sciences
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23298-0582
http://www.library.vcu.edu/


-----Medical Libraries Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> wrote: -----


To: [log in to unmask]
From: Julie Stielstra <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: Medical Libraries Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 04/07/2008 01:25PM
Subject: Re: The ease of Google, the relevance of a good PubMed search

I agree... BUT... sometimes  - especially, I would think, in health care -
you gotta have a professional do the work.  And Tiger Woods doesn't play
with KMart clubs.  I would like to think we still have a role as experts,
as
pros, and so WE need the more sophisticated tools, and WE need to
understand
how they work and when they don't, and what the workarounds and pitfalls
are.  And aren't we all still getting the calls that start with: "I've been
Googling this for an hour and can't find what I need"?  Easy, yeah, but not
always efficient or productive or correct, and it's our job to know the
various systems and when one trumps the other.   It depends on what kind of
job we have, how our mission is defined.  My job is to give people the
information they want, not to teach them how to do my job - they have a job
of their own already.

Just my 2 cents (or 0.01 Euros...)

>   I am not sure there is anything
> you can teach PubMed searchers, and if I may be so bold I might ask,
> "Why should we?  What our users want is the ease of Google, not to be
> taught the quirks of PubMed."