In 2006, Psychiatric Times upgraded its Web site (www.PsychiatricTimes. com) to make it more user-friendly and to provide more features of interest to our readers. As another step to enhance the value of the Web site, Psychiatric Times recently introduced a new search engine—SearchMedica/Psychiatry. This tool has been added to enable users of our Web site to search not only the Times's archives but also the psychiatric print literature, Medline, and other carefully selected and screened Internet sites in a manner that is very practitioner- friendly.
What makes SearchMedica/ Psychiatry better?
- It uses only sources screened for reliability and interest to psychiatrists, so that it will retrieve only professionalquality information, with no unfiltered consumer Web sites of dubious validity.
- It includes practical journals and other sources of information that you can use daily, rather than being limited only to the research literature.
- It allows you to view your results by "Categories" of information that physician advisors have identified as being most important to practitioners.
How to use the power of
SearchMedica's Categories
Just type a topic or question in the query
box and click on Search. If the initial results
displayed in the center column
seem to be the topic you are after, look
over to the gray boxes at the left of your
screen.
Are you most interested in Practical Articles and News? Then click on this Category and the display will change to show only this subset of your search results. Do you want to see what key opinion leaders have to say about your query? Then click on Research Reviews and Editorials.
Do you have a patient you might want to refer for inclusion in a clinical trial? Use the Clinical Trials for Patients Category. Interested in evidence-based medicine? Click on the Evidencebased Articles and Meta-analyses button. Or if you are looking for Practice Guidelines, select that button. Want to earn CME credit while filling in a gap in your knowledge base? Choose the Continuing Medical Education button. And if you are interested in exploring alternative treatments or learning how such treatments your patient may already be using might interact with the therapies you are prescribing, use the Alternative-Complementary Medicine Category.
In addition to these useful Categories, SearchMedica will soon be introducing a search Category for Patient Education Materials, such as brochures and other handouts to help your patients understand their condition and follow prescribed treatments.
Finally, SearchMedica offers a feedback function so that you can let the developers of the engine know whether a search was helpful to you and provide them with feedback they can use to make the engine even more useful and effective.
