Medical Search Engines

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By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

CancerNet

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The most well-known site for both basic, introductory articles on cancer and more extensive information is CancerNet, a service of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Your tax dollars support this site, so you might as well benefit from it. It is created to give you access to Physician Data Query (PDQ) information summaries on current treatment for both health professionals and patients, material on supportive care, screening and prevention, and information on investigational or newly approved drugs.

CancerNet also provides access to fact sheets on over 100 cancer-related topics from the NCI's Office of Cancer Communications, selected PDQ news items, information on ordering NCI publications, citations and abstracts on cancer topics extracted monthly on the bibliographic database CANCERLIT, and additional information on PDQ and its availability.

CANCERLIT

This bibliographic database contains more than 1.3 million citations and abstracts from over 4,000 different sources, including biomedical journals, proceedings, books, reports, and doctoral theses. Produced by the National Cancer Institute's International Cancer Information Center, CANCERLIT has been in existence for more than twenty years and contains references to the vast realm of cancer literature published from 1963 to the present. The database is updated with more than 8,000 records every month.

Like other bibliographic databases, CANCERLIT does not have full-text articles. It does, however, provide the title, authors, source, abstract (when available), and other basic information about the articles so you can quickly sort through them to choose those that are of interest. Then you will need to ask a medical librarian to help you locate the complete text . At least the abstract lets you know whether you want to read more about a particular topic. Often a conclusion will be given that, in itself, adds to your store of knowledge.

It is fairly easy to locate CANCERLIT resources on a wide variety of topics by using two types of searches.

1. Clicking on the CANCERLIT Bibliographic Database Standard Search Form will take you to a page on CancerNet (maintained by the National Cancer Institute) that is designed for quick searches. Here you enter the term or terms you wish to search for, separating each word by a space. These spaces between words are interpreted as "and" by the search engine, so if you search for more than one word or term (for example, breast and ovarian), each of those words will appear at least once in each of the records retrieved from your search.

2. Another search option is to use the NCI-Prepared Searches of Selected Topics. Each month, special literature searches are performed for about 90 topics, including AIDS-related cancers, leukemia and lymphoma, neurologic cancers, hereditary breast cancer, and hereditary prostate cancer. The topic searches include basic citation information and abstracts (when available). In addition to the new batch of searches added each month, the last six monthly editions of each topic search are also available.

MEDLINE: The Mother of All Medical Search Engines

MedLine (often typed in all caps as MEDLINE) is the world's largest medical database. At one time, this was only available to medical librarians and physicians, but is now free to the public.

To make the best use of MedLine, there is a terrific search tool developed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in conjunction with publishers of biomedical literature. It is called PubMed. This special program searches the 9 million citations in MedLine, plus citations which do not yet have MeSH index terms, and also links to participating online journals.

What is MeSH? Well, it stands for MEdical Subject Headings and you'll learn about it by reading an excellent article by Helen Stanbro, one of the people who help index MedLine. Her piece is on Steve Dunn's website, CancerGuide, at http://www.cancerguide.org/pubmed_hints.html. I recommend you first print her article and read it before going to PubMed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed. Using her recommendations -- and practicing a little -- will greatly improve your chances of finding the exact clinical information you need.

You can also search MedLine within a number of general health information sites. However, the ease with which you can search this database -- and other medical databases they may offer -- varies from site to site, so try several general health websites (see General Health Information Websites). Then use those that give you the information you want in a format which is easily understood and simple to use.