QMed Knowledge Foundation was registered as a Trust in December 2007. In 2008, when we had our formal inauguration, I had mentioned in my talk – “We aim to become redundant”. And we have actually paved the first steps towards this!   QMed can definitely become redundant (at least in its current Avtaar), in the not too distant future. This - if every institution teaching health science courses has librarians and faculty who can teach the skills of literature searching and referencing. They will need to teach these in depth and mentor students for these activities. This simply must happen…

When searching online databases, using the words - AND, OR and NOT, is a common practice. The terms AND, OR and NOT are called "Boolean Operators".  "But this is so simple and basic. Why are you writing a blog post about this?" - you might ask. I write this blog post because it is important to use Boolean Operators correctly while searching. It is important that anyone who searches online should know how these terms work. Everyone thinks it is simple. But many people make mistakes in their usage. I am not talking about the inadvertent slips (I make them…

Recently I had a conversation with a doctor. By the way, what I am going to write is not unique to this doctor, but it has happened with many. And so - this piece We were talking about our online courses for undergraduate students. And she said, "When I studied my medical degree, we did not have all these resources, we only used our library and read books ." And I asked "Were you introduced to the Index-Medicus"? There was silence. The answer was obviously no. Index Medicus was a resource available since the 1950s. It was a weekly index…