A note to blog followers from Cindy Schmidt

Many thanks to those of you who've taken the time to send me new search strategies and notes about needed corrections and revisions in the posted search strategies. I appreciate your input.  Please do feel free to contact me with corrections, suggestions for search revisions, etc. I know I make mistakes/oversights/etc. and like to have the opprotunity to correct them.  My e-mail etc. can be found at http://www.unmc.edu/library/facstaff.htm

You have probably noticed that I post a lot of search strategies during the months of April and May. Some of these are strategies I've composed for use in correcting student searches. They may include terms that I would not include when composing searches solely for my own or my patrons' use.  For instance, I often include foreign generic names that would be retrieved by a truncated term that is also present in the search statement.  Some of the other searches I post are strategies generated in part by pharmacy students taking required drug information/literature evaluation courses. Our pharmacy students are required to write a systematic review during the course of their education and I teach the search skills needed to produce such a review.  Any student strategies I post are essentially authored/co-authored by me as I  know which terms I want the students to include before the course starts, I tell the students where to find the needed terms, how to compose the strategies, and then correct the strategies again, and again, and again until the students submit strategies that are very nearly the strategies I wanted to see before the course began.  That said, these strategies are not always the exact strategies I would generate if I was starting from scratch.  Still, I've put a lot of work into them and don't want to have to start from scratch if faced with the same topic in the future -- so I post them on the blog.  Your suggestions for revision are, of course, welcome! 

Some drug strategies have only been checked against the drug names listed in Martindale's: The Complete Drug Reference (MICROMEDEX). You may find additional drug names in the MeSH databases "entry term" list or in DrugDex. If you happen to find that I've missed terms listed in any of these sources or any other sources and if you have time, please do let me know.  Again, you can find my e-mail address and other contact info at:
http://www.unmc.edu/library/facstaff.htm