EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE TUTORIAL No 1

EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE TUTORIAL No 1 An Introduction to Searching on the Internet. Information gathered from the internet can be useful in practice. The internet is uncontrolled and a significant amount of information can be commercial and inaccurate. However, the internet can be a very useful source of information about medical specialties, the American Osteopathic Association, images for presentations, consumer organisations and charities e.g. BackCare and provide access to free online medical journals such as BMJ (an annual fee of £20-00 will be charged for personal access to BMJ from January 2005) www.bmj.com, NELH www.nelh.nhs.uk and for London based osteopaths HILO www.hilo.nhs.uk. The choice of sites that you use to access information is therefore very important. In order to access a website, you must first select a search engine. Selecting a Search Engine: Search engines rely on computer programmes called spiders or robots to crawl the Web and latch onto the words on each page. Keywords related to the topic are typed into a search “box” and the search engines scan its database and returns information from its files that link to websites. Using a search engine is a matter of trial and error, but you will soon find one you feel is the most efficient for your needs. Some examples are: www.Google.co.uk www.metacrawler.com www.askjeeves.co.uk www.metafind.com www.dogpile.co.uk ...