Patient Safety Orientation - PSL401 (Phase 1): 3- Introduction to PSNet & Google Scholar

1. Visit the PSNet link: http://psnet.ahrq.gov.

On the PSNet website, locate the the “Info” tab and selecting the “Help & Faq” link.

Please take some time to read through the Faq for answers to the following questions addressed by the website in several sections and note the answers in your Assignment Document:

1. a. What kind of content is available on AHRQ PSNet? Please include a brief description of all the resources   below?

• What is the AHRQ PSNet Collection comprised of? How do you determine what is relevant?
• What are "Classics"? What makes them different from the other resources?
• What are "Patient Safety Primers"?
• How was the glossary assembled?
• What are "Perspectives on Safety"? 

1. b. Finding Content on AHRQ PSNet? Please include a brief note about each of the items below?

• How does the search feature work?
• How does the browse feature work?
• How are the rankings of search results determined?

2. Let's take a broad look at the topics in PSNet to identify any of interest to you. Here is the PSNet link: http://psnet.ahrq.gov

   a. Use the Topics tab at the top (right next to the Home tab) and the "Expand All" link next to the "Filter All Topics" search box.

   b. Scroll down the expansion and note 3 areas of interest to you personally in your Assignment Document.

   c. Now, list the 11 major headings used to organize this section: "Approach to Improving Patient Safety" in your Assignement Document.

  (Below is the image of TOPICS)

(Here is an image of the expanded TOPICS section)

3. Next visit the Topics tab area of "Error Types" in the expanded section by scrolling down the page - be aware that Errors are described in 2 sections of the browseable topic guide. You are looking for the section that looks like this.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  .

  3. a. Note the 4 types of errors listed in your Assignment Document. 

  3. b. Look up the meaning of the first entry, "Active Errors," in the Glossary (Info tab menu). Copy the definition into the   Assignment Document.  

  3. c. Return to the Topics tab and listing for "Error Types" to select "Active Errors" again. This should bring you to over 2,000 resource entry citations. Notice on the left sidebar that there are different "Resource Types" associated with this topic. Name 5 that you think would be the most important for an orientation to this topic - list the 5 resource types in your Assignment Document.

   3. d. Next, from the left sidebar, select the "Classics" link to narrow down the citations to those deemed of highest relevance by the PSNet editors - and further narrow the results by selecting the "Journal Article" filter link. This should reduce the set of citations to around 60.

  3. d. (continued)  Select the article title, "A qualitative analysis of physician perspectives on missed and delayed outpatient diagnosis: the focus on system-related factors." Notice that when you open the link, the abstract appears and you are presented with a link to automate the PubMed citation retrieval. Also, look at the right sidebar links to Related Resources.

   3. d. (continued)  Automate the PubMed citation retrieval by pressing the link inside PSNet. Once you come to the PubMed citation page for this article, please note you are not in a page related to the UIC resources via the FindIt@uic button. On the citation page, you will see the PMID for the citation > 26111306. The PMID is a unique number associated with abstract inside the PubMed database and you can always search for this citation again by entering the PMID number in the PubMed search box. Also, note the right sidebar next to the abstract is populated with "Similar Articles" in PubMed. For your Assignment Document, please open the first link under Similar Articles and TYPE the PMID of the first linked article into your Assignment Document and the Article's Title.

4. a. Now, we are going to take the article citation listed above ("A Qualitative Analysis of Physician Perspectives on Missed and Delayed Outpatient Diagnosis: The Focus on System-Related Factors") to into Google Scholar to look for articles that cite it. 

Begin by going to the Patient Safety Guide http://researchguides.uic.edu/patientsafety_guide. You will be landing on the Databases & Resources tab. In the middle column, choose the link to the Health Sciences Databases A-Z  guide. Open up this guide and look for the Google Scholar link on this page. Remember, you use the library links to go to Google Scholar so that you are recognized as in the UIC community and can be connected to full-text.Alternatively, you can use the Medicine Hub link to Google Scholar located at http://researchguides.uic.edu/medicine - It is good to get to know more about both the Patient Safety Guide, which you will use throughout the program and the Medicine Hub, which is very fast.

On the Google Scholar web page, look for the little carot that indicates a pull-down - below the carot is just inside the search box to the right. Note, the carot may be inaccessible on certain devices - so use your computer to get to this pull-down.

4. a. (continued)  Notice in the example below that the title from PSNet is entered into the Advance Page of the Google Scholar search engine (the image below is the Advance Page search box set). This method is among the fastest ways to find a title and begin linking to full-text. The "Exact Phrase" search box is very efficient and can be amplified in effectiveness by adding in an author                                                                                                                                                                                             name or publication title.

4. a. (continued)  Once you have searched for the title, you should see results that look like the image below. Note the 2 Cited By links! Also note the "more" link below the citation as this will become relevant in the event the citation does not have a full-text option in plain sight (e.g, the researchgate.net  link to full-text pdf). See the box below for next steps. 

4.a. (continued)  Continuing our process with the PSNet citation, please note we have opened the link to the 2 citing links connected to the title in Google Scholar.

Next, we will look for a specific word inside these citing articles - "SLOW" is the term we placed in the search box once the "Search within citing articles" box was chosen (see the box to check just below the title of the original article that has been cited).

This search within citing articles function is invaluable since it allows you to look inside the full-text (for the most part) documents available in Google Scholar (unlike PubMed and other citation databases, Google Scholar allows you to search the contents of the full-text pdf in about 70% of cases). So we now know that the term "SLOW" appears in the 2 citing articles to our original article.

Note, the search box associate with the citing articles only becomes operationally tied to the citing articles by checking the "Search within citing articles" option - else, the box remains operational at the level of all Google Scholar contents. You can demonstrate this to yourself by unchecking the box and searching for "SLOW" to retrieve many more citations containing this word.

Also, you should note, if "SLOW" was contained in only one of the citing documents, only the document containing the word would still appear. This function is very useful in clinical or research medicine when you are looking for sub-population tables since these sub-population datapoints are often not containing in the citation records that comprise the PubMed database (when you search PubMed, you are searching citation records and not full-text).

4. a. (continued)  Now, take everything you learned about searching for an article in Google Scholar by using the title - and search for a an article of your choosing. Then open the Citing Articles link and perform a search within these citing articles using a term you think might appear in several of the citing articles. Paste a SNIP or Screenshot of the search within the Citing Articles into your Assignment Document.

5. a. Choose a term out of the Glossary and use it to find articles related to this jargon or specialized terminology. In the example above, you can see "Authority Gradient", a term located in the Glossary, was used for the search. Then a narrowing to 378 articles was achieved using the Classic Filter. We could specify even further by using the Review Filter to look at 37 reviews. See this illustrated in the image below.

Please choose a Topic or Glossary term from PSNET and conduct a search for articles, especially Classic or Review articles.

Take a Screen Shot or SNIP (see SNIP - see Snipping Tool in your Microsoft program list) of the image of the search you ran and put it into the Assignment Document.

Type the title you are going to check in Google Scholar after first making sure that the title is old enough to have garnered some citations. You may have to look at several titles to achieve this outcome in the Google Scholar search since older articles are more likely to have been cited.

Once you have found the article from PSNet using the Google Scholar "exact phrase" search box, please take a SNIP of the Google Scholar page that demonstrates the citations linked to the original article - please open the link to the citing articles before taking the image shot. Place this image in your Assignment Document.  

This set of exercises in PSNet and Google Scholar is intended to help you prepare for your 3 article assignment in Week 1. Make sure you look at the video on the Tab 2 - Orientation to 2 Accounts first as it has a brief tutorial that shows the movement from PSNet to Google Scholar.