A new and greatly improved search engine made its debut this month on the Psychiatric Times Web site (www.psychiatrictimes.com). The engine will facilitate searching for articles archived on the site—but it is designed to go far beyond that to provide a clinician-friendly means of searching the World Wide Web for relevant psychiatric and medical information.
The engine, called SearchMedica, is designed specifically for practicing psychiatrists and mental health professionals. It provides a means of searching carefully selected sources of on-line content that is more comprehensive than PubMed/Medline but more focused than general search engines such as Google or Yahoo. A demonstration of the new search engine will be available in the exhibit area at the U.S. Psychiatric — Mental Health Congress, to be held November 16 to 19 in New Orleans.
SearchMedica retrieves practical information that psychiatrists can use immediately in patient care (no research reports on rats, mice, and guinea pigs). It includes sources of useful information that Medline does not index. It is more selective than general search engines because its content comes from carefully selected medical sites, not unfiltered consumer sources.
The search engine also allows massive numbers of search returns to be broken down into key subsets of information that can be reviewed quickly.
These subsets, or "categories" enable the user not only to retrieve information from hundreds of preselected medical sites and millions of citations from PubMed/Medline but also to break up and view the search in several different categories of information that SearchMedica physician-advisors identified as being most helpful in clinical decision making. The search engine categories allow users to quickly and efficiently review the following types of information related to their search:
- Practical Articles and News: Articles from Psychiatric Times and our medical news service as well as content from other publications that focuses on practical information that health professionals can use.
- Research Reviews and Editorials: Review articles and editorials that key opinion leaders have published on the topic of your search.
- Evidence-based Medicine and Meta-analyses: Randomized con trolled trials, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews relevant to your query.
- Practice Guidelines: Guidelines issued by specialty societies, gov ernment sources, and other consensus statements.
- Clinical Trials for Patients: Details on clinical trials in which your patients might be enrolled
SearchMedica may be accessed at www.psychiatrictimes.com.
