You used an electronic index, a guideline index, and a web search engine to retrieve information relevant to your clinical problem. Compare and contrast your results. Which resources were useful/ not useful for your information retrieval task, and why?
During the module 3 retrieval activity, I was able to use many electronic and guideline indexes and a couple web search engines. Before becoming more proficient in using resources such as PubMed I used Google. Google is a good search engine, but you may have to search through pages of articles and websites before finding what you are truly looking for. I find that medical based indexes such as PubMed and CINAHL to work much better for my needs in finding articles related to the subject I am researching. EndNote is another useful tool in research; I can search for articles through EndNote and keep the relevant citations in a folder for later use. There are a couple downsides to the EndNote program; you have to make sure to edit your citations to the correct format and the program does not always find a full version or link to your article of choice. I did go the National Guideline Clearinghouse web site for the first time and found that I did not get as large of a selection on my particular subject: Neonatal sepsis. I tried using different words to expand the results but usually I was only able to retrieve 7 entries, however, I feel that my inexperience may be to blame. I will go back to that site again at a later date to see if I can learn to make better use of it in the future.
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