Ves Dimov at the Clinical Cases and Images blog is working on the best way to keep abreast of news in the medical literature. Dr. Dimov’s “5 tips” for staying up to date is a great first stop. The first point is to follow the RSS feeds of the major journals using a feed reader such as my favorite, Google Reader.
I don’t like the journal RSS feeds, even though I agree they are a good resource. Unlike a medical blog which kicks out one or three posts a day, the journal feeds are silent until an issue comes out and 20-30 updates appear in the feed. Each article, whether a book review or a major study, gets one entry. There’s no linkage between opinion pieces and the studies that prompted them. Pictures (such as important graphs or clinical images) are not part of the feed. I found that I prefer the way that a medical blog will discuss an article instead of the simple summary and link that I get now.
Using medical blogs can be better than the raw RSS. Dr. Dimov and others put together weekly reviews. I recently subscribed to Physician’s First Watch which provides one-line notes about major articles. First Watch is available by email or RSS. I’m still experimenting to see which is the best route for me. I have been so busy lately that I am barely checking my email, and never open Google Reader.
More recently, some physicians have begun to use Twitter, which is a combination of IM and social networking. RSS requires some technical knowhow to understand and set up. Twitter is accessible to anyone who has ever sent an IM. I can’t agree that Twitter wins. The social aspect leads to a lot of less than informational chatter. 140 characters is really small! It’s barely enough to mention a title and a hyperlink, much less why the hyperlink is worth following.
The solution is less about the technology and more about the content. I believe that human-generated summaries, properly hyperlinked, are the only way to digest the steady stream of medical literature out there. In the end, you still have to read the full article.
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