The third workshop of 2013 was held in Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai on Saturday, 23rd March 2013, between 4 pm and 7.30 pm. Vasumathi Sriganesh & Lakshmi conducted this one.
We had been trying to do this for quite some time at Jaslok. Drs Sanjay Nagral and Rajesh Sainani helped us plan it out, and were assisted by Dr Pravin Agrawal. Though they initially hoped that a good number of DNB residents from their own hospital would sign up, the final participants were a mix of only a small group of residents, and more of faculty from their own hospital plus a few from neighbouring hospitals. We had around 20 participants.
We introduced a few changes in the program. We divided participants into four groups and asked each group to choose a topic and answer some questions about how they usually searched and what they did with the references they found. They mentioned that they
- Typed in keywords or a plain English query in the search box
- Looked for Review and Free articles
- Saved their references in their computer’s desktop
- Very often found it difficult to locate the same references / articles again
- Repeated the entire process if they needed to
We also asked them what made them sign up for this program and everyone said they hoped that they could make better sense of PubMed.
We told them that the program would tackle all these issues and guide them to be more systematic. The program was a mix of teaching of concepts and features and participants did group activities for problem solving. While we still await formal feedback in our online forms, we did get some informal feedback which matched several of our earlier feedbacks –
“We realized how we’d been using PubMed so badly till now”
At the end of the workshop participants had a much clearer idea about how to search for topics very clearly, how they could save their searches and collections and also about the need for a reference management software.
One more doctor asked “When will you have your next workshop? I wish to learn the more advanced features”!
Thanks once again – Dr Pravin Agrawal, Dr Rajesh Sainani and Dr Sanjay Nagral for organizing this workshop. We hope there will be more and that all your DNB students participate!
