By Hope Leman

 

I am looking this morning at the health/medical search engine iSEEK Medical. 

 

Like what I see so far. Nice, clean interface (i.e. not cluttered up with ads).

 

And it has the unique look (as far as I can tell) among commercial medical search engines of featuring nice big icons that enable the user to quickly switch to searching for results in specific resources such as PubMed, Clinicaltrials.gov, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Cochrane Collaboration among others. That is a solid list of authoritative sources.

 

But it is also somewhat limited compared to those searched by Mednar and iSEEK Medical certainly lacks the power searching functionalities and pizzazz of DeepDyve and is not a tool for the sophisticated audience that GoPubMed and Novoseek serve.

 

iSEEK most resembles SearchMedica.

 

iSEEK does have the handy feature of enabling users to email individual abstracts or the whole page of results to others or to oneself. This is particular useful for clinical trial news. Medical librarians might want to take a look at iSEEK Medical as might those who are newly diagnosed with a serious, debilitating illness or who love someone who has and who want to email medical providers, the patient or their loved ones the exact details of a clinical trial. I tested the feature and got an email in a few minutes that took me to the results in clinicaltrials.gov of my search results on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This should prove a boon to those researchers trying to recruit subjects for study and for patients hoping to enroll in them.

 

Some features of iSEEK Medical require registration (which is free) and I did not take that route, preferring to look at it sans that option for now.

 

Some things were a bit clunky in iSEEK Medical. You are given dates from which to choose articles, for instance, but it is not clear why some months are excluded. For example, you can look at abstracts for June 2009 and April 2009 but not, for some reason, January 2009 or May 2009.

 

Also, the categorization was a bit peculiar. I tried “Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis” and got a hodgepodge of results ranging from an item on home ventilation dating from 1993 to a 1974 article on the administration of guanidine in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Maybe the category “Patients with” is always a bit of mess, no matter what search engine one tries. It was on this category that I wished that iSEEK Medical possessed the incredibly useful “More like this” feature of DeepDyve. That feature would have propelled me from fairly useless results to something relevant and more recent.

 

The options for customizing your search iSEEK Medical are quite limited compared to the gold standard of PubMed.

 

I would say that iSEEK Medical is a good start but so far is unspectacular and not high up in the “wow” category. But doctors and nurses, allied health professionals and health science students who want a fairly straightforward interface and just the facts without heaps of unwanted options for drilling down might like iSEEK.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 7:41 am and is filed under Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.