Search Medica Search
Sep 25th, 2008 by sandnsurf
SearchMedica have teamed with ModernMedicine.com to provide this great ‘Professional Medical Search’ resource. SearchMedica is a health professional search engine which scans reputable journals, systematic reviews, and evidence-based articles to provide search results. Although SearchMedica displays fewer results than standard search engines, I found the return to be very accurate, clinically relevant and surprisingly comprehensive.
There are several country specific sites currently available such as SearchMedica UK, France, Spain and the US - with more sites coming soon.
The search function is easy to use with a single search bar provided to perform standard keyword search across all medical fields or refined search by specialty interest (such as oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, infectious disease, musculoskeletal and paediatric medicine). Search results can be further refined by
- Research/Reviews: Articles from peer-reviewed journals, mostly original research and reviews
- Evidence-based Articles: Randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews
- Practice Guidelines: Issued by medical specialty societies and governmental agencies, plus reports from consensus development conferences
- Practical Articles/News: General information and guidance on clinical topics
- Patient Education: Brochures and handouts for patients
- Clinical Trials for Patients: Mainly US based from government database
- CME: Continuing medical education courses available online
- Complementary Medicine
I found the search results to clinical questions to be accurate and the content to be from clinically reputable sources and contain medically-relevant information. The option to further ‘broaden or narrow’ my search or review ‘related concepts’ are also great additional features.
The order of result return is different to standard search engines with results ranked by ‘relevance’ and optionally by ‘publication date’ and not by ‘popularity’. The algorithmic determination of ‘relevance’ in returning a search result is always fraught with danger as the most ‘clinically relevant’ paper/article to a search query may not be the most recently published, or the most popular and so it is always a fine balance to determine the best way to display the results. However, in the few examples tried so far I managed to find the most appropriate clinical information returned within the first page of results on most occasions.
Benefits of this medical search engine
- Easy to use
- Clinically accurate search results
- Multiple, simple search refinement options
- Result page clearly demonstrates whether the returned result is ‘freely available’ - (in pdf form); or ’secure’ (- on a site which requires registration to view)
- Useful and functional ‘pre-determined’ search list
More information from SearchMedica can be found in their about us page and also in this great interview on AltSearchEngines.com
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