Module 2

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? Identify some alternative strategies for retrieving relevant information - would context relevant information retrieval be useful? (You must be detailed enough here, so that your blog entry evidences your use of both NGC and Google).

The search question that I wanted to search was: "What are the current practices/suggestions for diabetes management among the Pacific Islander population." Using the three various guideline indexes, I would have to say that the one that gave me the most promising results was the web search engine.

Using the LexisNexis database index (an electronic index) was tedious and time consuming. I am much more familiar with PubMed and CINAHL. The results from this search were also primarily from newspaper and news magazine sources. When I tried to export these sources to my EndNote reference manager, they were only exportable as RefWorks citations. The Boolean codes were also very difficult as they were different from PubMed and CINAHL. I did like the fact that the references were full text and you could view the results in list, expanded list and full text views.

Using the guideline index (specifically NCG) I was only able to 7 different guidelines regarding the management of diabetes, but not specifically geared towards Pacific Islanders. When viewing the results, the terms "Pacific Islanders" only showed up in the "risk factors" section in all of the guidelines. While the treatment and management of diabetes may be the same for adults regardless of race/ethnicity, I was interested to see if there were any interventions that were specifically geared towards this population because of their high risk.

The web search engine "Google Scholar" is one of my favorite searches to use. I have found that it is user friendly and can point me in the right direction. Of course we must always take into account that this is a "web" search and so we should always be wary of the sources (reader beware), however, it is a great starting point and I have learned some tricks including using the advanced search options in Google search. When searching in Google Scholar, without putting any limitations, it pulled up 16, 300 results. After putting limitations which included only the most recent publications over the last 5 years, including the exact phrase "Pacific Islanders" and excluding "children", the results were whittled down to 608. Immediately I was able to find an article that was exactly what I was looking for titled "Diabetes Training of Community Health Workers Serving Native Hawaiians and Pacific People" (Look, Bumhofer, Ng-Osorio, Furubayashi, and Kimata, 2008). This article talked about culturally customized education that could be used to help Pacific Islanders manage their diabetes.

Another web search engine that I like to use when looking for quality sources on the web is the "HONcode" search. I typed in the same Boolean as the Google Scholar search and the results were 10 articles from trusted sites which included a PubMed government article with a full-text option. The article was specifically geared towards a community based program specifically for Pacific Islanders ( Wang, Abbott, Goodbody, Hui, and Rausch, 1999).

I think that all of the search indexes and search engines have their place and merit. I think that as always, it is important to follow the guidelines outlined in our readings for analyzing the quality of the articles that we site.

Reference:

Look, M.A., Baumhofer, N.K., Ng-Osorio, J., Furubayashi, J.K., & Kimata, C. (2008). Diabetes Training of Community Health Workers Serving Native Hawaiians and Pacific People. The Diabetes Educator, 34; 834 DOI: 10.1177/0145721708323639.

Wang, C.-Y., Abbott, L., Goodbody, A. K., Hui, W.-T. Y., & Rausch, C. (1999). Development of a Community-Based Diabetes Management Program for Pacific Islanders. The Diabetes Educator, 25(5), 738-746. doi: 10.1177/014572179902500506