#17: What are the available online resources?

When dealing with medical writing, either targeting the medical professionals or the lay public, you will need technical support for your writing. When I say technical support, I mean resources or information that you will use for:

· A background research of the topic you are writing (eg, bipolar disorder)
· Finding patient information (eg, for a brochure about heart attack)
· Verifying data or supporting a claim
· Locating a particular clinical paper
· Finding suitable references
· Others

Besides printed publication, such as medical textbooks, journals and dictionaries, the internet is another important source of medical and health sciences information. Depending on what kind of information you are looking for, there a plethora of web sites for you to search from.

PubMed
For most of my work, I use PubMed very frequently to locate references and verify data presented by speakers. The journal database lets you look up journal names, the citation matcher allows you to verify a single or multiple citations.

PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine that includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals. Resources included in this database are such as abstracts and full-text publications (for certain journals and after a certain period after publication).

MedlinePlus
MedlinePlus is another service from the US National Library of Medicine. The medical information it provides is more consumer oriented. Here, you can read about 740 health topics and current health news, learn about drugs and supplements, or look up information with their medical encyclopedia and dictionary. This is a suitable online resource when you need to develop a patient-oriented publication.

Others
· eMedicine – provides peer-reviewed articles for healthcare professionals. A good read if you need to get an overall understanding of a particular disease, including it pathophysiology, complications and treatment.
· Medscape – offers free CME articles, medical news, full-text journal articles. You need to sign up as a member to access the articles. Registration is free.

The above mentioned are only a few that I’ve used before. There are still many more out there. If you know of any that is useful, please let me know! :)