Off Topic: 10 ways to find medical studies on the web
Methods I use to discover/find medical studies
Henry Lahore, founder of Vitamin D Life - April 2018
I have searched for information all of my life
Before I became an Electronics Engineer I had hought about being a librarian
https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/
"the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers"
74,000,000 PDFs as of June 2019
Sci-Hub finds a free PDF associated with PubMed# or DOI (Digital Object Idenfier) #
It gets copies via University subscriptions
PDFs are sometimes accepted manuscripts, not finals with editing and formatting
Sci-Hub thyically will not have the PDF on the day it is first published
Frequently Sci-Hub does not respond at all (too many visitors, publisher fights)
About 50% of the time Sci-Hub will have previously obtained the PDF
Sometimes Sci-Hub will obtain the PDF while you wait - about 2 minutes
Check Check Twitter for Sci-Hub URL updates
Sci-Hub article on Verge - Feb 2018
"Elsevier, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. It has reported a nearly 39 percent profit margin for its scientific publishing arm"
Open Access now (not Sci-Hub) now accounts for 28 % Digital Object Identifiers
"...many Open Access publishers charge scientists fees — often anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to around two thousand — for processing their articles, whether they’re accepted or not."
70 % of peer-review Open Access models do not charge anything
Researchgate was pressured into taking down 7 million unauthorized copies of their (publishers) papers.
Sci-Hub has “gained access” to “around 400 universities.”
"Now, once users pointed Sci-Hub toward an article, the site would check every university proxy server until it found one through which it could download the paper, and would download it automatically."
" “Access from China and Iran was blocked for some time because Sci-Hub couldn’t serve as many requests as were coming from these countries".
".She also made Sci-Hub inaccessible to Americans ( except those using VPNs ) — in part because of the number of download requests, but also because she wanted to avoid becoming a target for lawsuits.__
Sci-hub archive of [http://libgen.rs/scimag/items before Dec 2019]
PubMed
Excellent
Have used for decades, it provides news updates via RSS and email
I often limit a search to having "vitamin D" in the title so as to not get too many returns
28,000,000 studies as of April 2018
Very powerful filters – such as author, word must be in title, human,
Very good synomyn expansion of your queries.
allmedx
Superset of PubMed
Does not,however, allow you to be informed of updates in your topic of interest
See: Searching for Vitamin D studies – AllMEDx is a superset of PubMed
Dimensions
91,000,000 studies, 14,000,000 PDFs as of April 2018
Indexes medical studies from PubMed, Europe, Australia, etc.
Coverage appears to be a superset of PubMed
Usually has a list of references used by the study
Can sort by many attributes
Attention score is nice = how reported the study was in social media, etc
Can filter by sources - for example - Search for Magnesium but filter to only Clinical journals
Results of search for "Vitamin D" Autism
Trip database
TRIP = T urning R eseach I nto P ractice
Free and PRO ($45/year) versions
Pro version grealty improves searching tools
Example - searching by word proximity in title, etc,
This is the only search engine I am aware of that allows searching by word proximity
Search for "Vitamin D" ==> 16,721 results April 2018
Can filter and sort the results in many ways
Google Scholar
HUGE - all kinds of studies - not just medical
I have used it for years, it has RSS notifications of updates
Has great links to citations of older papers
Typically more citations = paper was considered of value
After you have found a great paper you can follow the citations to see what has happened since
Deepdive
Free for the first month, then monthly, yearly subscriptions
You can read (but not download) most PDFs which are behind paywalls
Vitamin D Life has subscribed to this since ~2014
Clinical Trials in US
Excellent way to get details behind a study - especially when publisher charges from a PDF
Nice way to see what dose sizes and health problems were to be tried
Researchgate
Typically 20% of the PDFs will be here a few months after publication
Kopernio add-on to Chrome browser
This is an add-on which activates automatically at some of the above search sites
Provides links to PDF various means: standard and non-standard
Green PDFs appear in PubMed. Google Scholar, Dimensions, etc if a PDF is available for free
Vitamin D Life
Search on any topic using searchbar at top of every page
- - - Non-English searches can be made if you use a Chrome browsers plugin
Browse by health topic with the left column
If you have a study title you can go to seachbar. type "quote" then 30-50 characters of title then end quote
After about 10 second - - -
First result wil be the PDF itself
Next result will be the webpage which has the PDF attached
You can subscribe to updates on any of 150+ topics,updates to a web page, etc.
Examine.com
Has in-depth overviews of nutrition and supplements
GreenMedInfo.com
Wide variety of medical information
I trust about 70% of what they say
I subscribe to their daily newsletter
Subscribe to updates (information comes to you)
RSS notifications from 20+ sources
I get notifications of new information from many sources - such as
PubMed, ScienceDirect, Feednavigator, Vitamin D Council, citeulike, Google Scholar
~10 Email mailing lists
~10 Facebook groups
Linked-In
Google News (Vitamin D)
Google Scholar