Information Retrieval

     This assignment brought back terrible memories from my evidence-based practice class.  I think I suffer from PTEBPC (Post traumatic evidence-based practice class).   I am determined to get the needed treatment and therapy to become successful at information retrieval.

     For Module 3, I used PubMed, CINAHL, National Guideline Clearinghouse, Google (Scholar) and Google to search for speech development in infants and preschoolers with otitis media.  
     I am very inefficient and spent many hours not really getting the information I was looking for.  I decided to really stick with PubMed because I have never gotten the hang of it.  I did not like the results I got from PubMed when searching from within Endnote (I did not realize until now that the search function is different).  I got better results when I searched PubMed and then imported the citations into Endnote.  I spent a good amount of time trying to find the MESH terms of my problem.  These terms were very helpful in getting good results when applied as a major topic.  The problem I had was that I could get results of about 6200 and then when I refined my search just a little, I would get only 9 articles.  I am not sure if that is good or bad.  I really liked the information from National Guideline Clearinghouse, it was easy to navigate using categories and I loved being able to compare more than one guideline side by side.  I am very surprised at the good information I obtained from Google Scholar.  Most information was old and often the links to the articles did not work, but surprisingly I found access to 3 of the articles I had found through PubMed.  My Google search was helpful because they had beautiful color photos of eardrums with varied degrees of otitis media compared to normal tympanic membranes.  
     I have learned many new things from this experience and hope to become more comfortable with this technology.  Depending on my needs, I will use all of the above indexes and search engines in the future.