Delving into the minds of our target audience

For nearly nine years, we at QMed, have been teaching, either by delivering lectures, or conducting workshops. In addition, we have helped people with their literature searches for their theses, articles they write, and even systematic reviews. It is indeed wonderful that we have reached out to a huge audience. The crying need in the country is however, tremendous. And we deliberate as to why we are unable to reach out to more, when everyone has praised our programs and sworn that they are very important. While there are several specific reasons for our workshops not reaching large enough numbers, we…
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A wonderful two days with UG students – at Quest Unplugged

A wonderful two days with UG students – at Quest Unplugged

June 1 and 2 of 2016 were two wonderful and rewarding days I spent. Quest Medical Academy - the brainchild of Dr Sushant Shinde had organized an event - Quest Unplugged.This is an annual event (this was the second) where  small groups of students chose topics, did some research on them and then presented the topics, based mainly on one core article that they chose, but also quoted others.The topics ranged from broad ones like Nutrition in the ICU, to very specific ones like Asthma - COPD overlap syndrome! Overall eight topics were presented on each day. Majority were equivalent…
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But PubMed does not have free articles

But PubMed does not have free articles

In a workshop on 'Literature Searching' for a group of DNB students I briefly explained the 'Filters' feature in PubMed. I gave an example of using this feature to locate 'free full text' articles. In this context a student remarked "Anyway 90% of articles in PubMed are not free, so this feature will not be of much use". I sigh again, thinking - "PubMed's role DOES NOT include providing free articles". And several students / health professionals do not know this. PubMed has been available free since 1997. That is nearly 20 years now. And yet, many health professionals (and…
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