the metablog

You can easily follow extra journals with metajournal, and so increase the range of publications used to recommend personally-relevant articles.

Sometimes the most important specialty-specific articles are published in the big journals, such as The Lancet or The New England Journal of Medicine – and now metajournal indexes articles from these journals, as well as from JAMA, The BMJ, CMAJ and MJA. (You can also directly browse articles from the journals themselves.)

The easiest way to add extra journals to follow is via your settings page. Click on Journals and from there you can easily search for new journals to follow by name, or unfollow journals that no longer interest you.

When you first join metajournal, you automatically follow all the main publications from your specialty. However by refining your list of followed journals you can fine tune things further.

If you follow journals outside your specialty, its important to tell metajournal what your clinical interests are by following a good number of Topics (at least ten). Metajournal uses the topics that you follow to predict and suggest specific articles that are relevant to your practice, even if they are published in journals outside your specialty.

Along with the great amount of interest recently from FANZCA anaesthetists, I have received many requests for metajournal to cover more of the pain literature.

After a little bit of work, Pain Medicine has been added as the fourth metajournal specialty, along with indexing 21 pain-related journals.

In addition to these core pain journals, important related publications such as Lancet Neurology, Neuroscience and the Journal of Neuroimaging, have also been indexed and can be independently followed.

To add Pain medicine as a specialty, simply visit your settings page and scroll to the Specialties, Journals & Topics section. Clicking the label of the specialty you already follow will then allow you to add 'Pain medicine' alongside it. (You can also add or remove Journals and Topics that you follow on your settings page too).

Adding pain medicine pushes metajournal's indexed articles count to well over 100,000 articles! Lucky you've got metajournal to help you find quality personally-relevant evidence among all that. ;-)

Big news this week – metajournal now provides one-click access to article full-text via ANZCA for ANZCA Fellows and trainees.

Beneath article abstracts online at metajournal.com or within your weekly emailed metajournal, Australian and New Zealand metajournal users will see a link to: Full text @ ANZCA.

Clicking this link will take you to the article full-text for many of the major critical-care journals if ANZCA holds a current subscription. Note that some full-text access has time embargoes, and for some journals (e.g. Minerva) direct links are not yet possible.

You will need to login with your ANZCA password after clicking the link, and for Ovid holdings you will also need to login using the ANZCA library's Ovid password – email the great ANZCA librarians to request this password. (Your computer or smartphone should remember these passwords for you for next time.)

To edit your institutional affiliations, for example to add full-text links to your hospital (RMH, RWH...) or university (USyd, UniMelb, Deakin, Monash...) journal subscriptions, simply visit the settings page.

As always, If your hospital, college or university is not listed, let me know and I will see if I can add it!

You may have noticed a link beneath each article abstract: Collect...

This allows you to create collections of articles that share a common theme, answer a clinical question, or that you want to group together for any other reason. Perhaps articles to read this month; papers every anesthesia trainee should know; or even a list of your own publications.

Have a browse through the article collections that have already been created, such as the evidence for surgical safety checklists, or landmark articles in anesthesia or intensive care medicine.

Creating a collection is as simple as clicking Collect... beneath an article abstract or Create new article collection... on the main collections page.

Article collections can have their own notes (summaries, pearls and comments), just like articles do.

Capture, summarize and share your collected-evidence with your colleagues and the world!

Recently I needed to refer a patient preoperatively to a cardiologist for review. This is not an uncommon situation – one which happens thousands of times every week throughout the world. And yet it is a referral that anesthesiologists and anesthetists often do very poorly.

Avoid hypoxia, avoid hypotension?

We sometimes roll our eyes at recommendations made by physician colleagues: either providing unhelpful physiological parameters that we normally aim to maintain anyway (“avoid hypoxia?”), or stepping outside their expertise and boxing the anesthetist in by suggesting specific anesthetic techniques (“okay for a spinal”).

It is easy to be annoyed at both the lack of value this adds to our perioperative planning, as well as to the nonchalant ignorance of intraoperative medicine that it betrays. At the end of the day though, it’s our fault.

As Dr Andrew Silvers, a Melbourne cardiac and neuro-anesthetist recently opined, if your cardiologist replies with “avoid hypoxia and avoid hypotension” then YOU the anesthetist or anesthesiologist are at fault for not asking your cardiology colleague specific questions that will materially effect your perioperative planning.

Read more...