Treatment for hyperparathyroidism
I had a pharmacy student come in and say he was looking for information on hyperparathyroidism (for those who were asking about the spelling of specialized terms, I had a go at spelling it on paper and then showed it to him to confirm that I’d got it right. I like to write down key terms as the patron describes what he/she is looking for. That way I don’t have to keep a lot of unfamiliar terms in short-term memory and I can go back and re-do searches when I have more time, to see if there is a better way to find relevant information.)
He said he’d been searching in PubMed and MBASE, but hadn’t been able to find anything useful. He also said he thought he was a pretty good searcher and couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t find anything. (At this point I started to sweat a bit. Work on the reference desk has the potential to make you look like a hero or an idiot -- sometimes you even look like both when you’re dealing with the same person. For those of my classmates who figure that I’ll choose only questions that make me look like a genius, I promise I’ll include some where I come out looking less than brilliant.)
I asked him a few more questions to get some more search terms from him. He was looking for information on treatments, especially those involving the use of vitamin D.
To start, I took him in through the Resources by Subject to the Pharmaceutical Science page. He didn’t seem to be aware of this and so I pointed out that it had a lot of good information that had been selected especially for pharmacy studies. He seemed happy to find that this existed.
I chose the database International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) and showed him how to build a search and limit results to English and studies dealing with humans. When we combined the search terms and limits we had about 24 hits. One we tried to look at was not available through UBC or CISTI, but further down we found a good recent review article that covered exactly what he was looking for. He was very happy because he’d learned something about building a search and found the information he was looking for.
He said he’d been searching in PubMed and MBASE, but hadn’t been able to find anything useful. He also said he thought he was a pretty good searcher and couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t find anything. (At this point I started to sweat a bit. Work on the reference desk has the potential to make you look like a hero or an idiot -- sometimes you even look like both when you’re dealing with the same person. For those of my classmates who figure that I’ll choose only questions that make me look like a genius, I promise I’ll include some where I come out looking less than brilliant.)
I asked him a few more questions to get some more search terms from him. He was looking for information on treatments, especially those involving the use of vitamin D.
To start, I took him in through the Resources by Subject to the Pharmaceutical Science page. He didn’t seem to be aware of this and so I pointed out that it had a lot of good information that had been selected especially for pharmacy studies. He seemed happy to find that this existed.
I chose the database International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) and showed him how to build a search and limit results to English and studies dealing with humans. When we combined the search terms and limits we had about 24 hits. One we tried to look at was not available through UBC or CISTI, but further down we found a good recent review article that covered exactly what he was looking for. He was very happy because he’d learned something about building a search and found the information he was looking for.
posted by InfoLit Librarian at 1:08 p.m.
4 Comments:
Duncan,
This might be the kind of question that Google could handle:
http://www.google.com/search?hs=WEj&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=hyperparathyroidism&btnG=Search
That said, I am pleased you used the IPA database (Int'l pharmacy database) as we often, in our need to search MEDLINE, EMBASE & CINAHL, forget IPA.
Good story. I wonder if this is the type of question that might be answered with an alternative medicine website/database?
Dean
Scirus! too:
http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=%22vitamin+d%22+hyperparathyroidism+treatment&ds=jnl&ds=nom&ds=web&g=s&t=all
It's also difficult when a user limits themselves. Often, I find people who think they know what they're doing have never heard of the MeSH database. I should know, I was one of those last December when I started my practicum.
Another thing that never fails to amaze me is how my own perception of whether I'm looking like a hero or an idiot (mostly the latter) differs from the perceptions of the user...
You make a good point about users limiting themselves, Niki. One thing I have to remind myself is to ask enough probing questions to make sure that I'm not being led astray by their preconceived ideas of what they're looking for (this does't mean that I know better than they do what they're looking for, but that their descriptions can be quite misleading and incomplete) or where to look for it.
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