Evidence-based medicine matters

LDA aims to improve Lyme disease diagnosis and treatment for UK patients. This can only be done through assessing quality evidence.

Everyone needs to be careful about what they read in newspapers, magazines and on the internet. Check what you read against reputable sources. Read more from Sense About Science.

Finding Technical Lyme Articles

Google Scholar – This is the simplest tool to use. Search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. This tool will give you links to full text of articles where available.

Get The Research is aimed at the general public and allows you to find open access, peer-reviewed papers. It aims to help the non-specialist to understand scientific topics.  Selecting a paper from your search (try neuroborreliosis) you can click on highlighted words and see an explanation in the margin. Try it out – you may find it useful!

Researchgate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers. It is free to join and many researchers post their papers.

PubMed Central – A digital archive of life sciences journal literature. PMC provides free and unrestricted access to the full text of over 160 life sciences journals.

PubMed – A service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations from MEDLINE and additional life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950’s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources. Help on how to use PubMed

Trip Database – a clinical search tool designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice

PLoS Medicine – Public Library of Science Medicine believes that medical research is an international public resource. The journal publishes articles of general interest on biomedical, environmental, social and political determinants of health.

Directory of Open Access Journals – The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. The journal must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included.

Saving your papers

Having read some papers, do you want to store them for easier searching? There are a lot of Reference Management Systems out there, so find something that suits your computer operating system, your needs and your pocket.

Many are free. Try one out.