A recurring topic amongst the residents and preceptors at the University of Arizona is the transition to autonomous practitioner. This transition to new practitioner is rife with peaks and valleys – especially as one establishes their role on various healthcare teams. One particular area that I have both triumphed and fallen flat is keeping current with ‘The Literature’. ‘The Literature’ was once a nebulous, abstract and distant afterthought as I trudged through the didactic portions of pharmacy school (if ‘The Literature’ was not going to be on the next Med Chem test or NAPLEX, why should I care?). While that attitude was tolerable during the first couple years of pharmacy school, I soon realized the need to figure out what this whole Literature thing was all about. It would be referenced by our professors, residents performing guest lectures, new and seasoned preceptors. Now that the transition from student to resident is 17 months passed, I enjoy reflecting back on my transformation into a practitioner who readily quotes ‘The Literature’.
As I perused the idea of keeping current with the medical literature, I found several articles from the 1950’s offering tips to busy physicians who would like to keep up with the 400+ English Language medical journals in print at the time. My desire to keep up with the literature is far from a new struggle.
All practitioners I have discussed the topic with seem to have different methods to keep current with the literature in their specialty… which brings me to the burning question – what tools do you utilize to keep current with the literature?
I’ll share with you some of my favorites – PLEASE share your methods in the comments section (or contact me directly through ASHP Connect).
-Evidence Updates from BMJ – top notch information about new articles in your selected specialties (free!)
-Journal Watch from NEJM – similar to Evidence Updates, reviews >6 months old are free.
-InoReader, OldReader, Feedly, et al – RSS Feeds have been a great way for me to organize various types of information into manageable sections. I am unsure about other specialties, but Emergency Medicine has a vibrant online/social media scene and I often find great pearls and tips from various blogs, FOAMed topics (Free Open Access Medical Education) along with traditional primary literature. Some personal favorites are ALiEM, EMCrit, The Poison Review and MANY others.
-PubMed allows users to set up recurring emails that can update you daily to monthly about new articles indexed in PubMed that meet your predefined search criteria. I have found this very useful when I develop an in-depth talk (Continuing Education topic, Grand Rounds, Seminar, etc) and want to stay abreast of recent, relevant developments.
-The Pharmacist’s Letter is another tool to explore (I am fortunate that my practice site provides a subscription to all pharmacists).
-UpToDate provides a large database of clinically relevant topics, and you can sign up for emails highlighting “What’s New”.
-eTOC (electronic table of contents) is another popular tool to keep up with individual journals. I prefer the RSS feeds (InoReader, et al) to the eTOCs but that seems to come down to practitioner preference. Here is the eTOC page for AJHP
Try them out and let me know what works for you. Looking forward to learning other techniques from readers on how to stay current!
I don’t plan to reference primary literature often in my blog posts, but couldn't resist this time:
- Flaxman N. How to keep up with medical literature. J Am Med Assoc. 1954 Apr 24;154(17):1409-10. PMID: 13151864
- Morton LT. Medical literature: How to keep up to date. Practitioner. 1951 Mar;166(993):281-5. PMID: 14816230