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October 2025
What do we have for you this month?
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- CEO Speaks
- From our Blog
- Do You Know
- Useful articles
- QMedCourses News & Testimonials
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From our CEO
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I hope you all had a Great Diwali! Our wishes to all of you for this festive season.
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We have done a lot of planning this month in upgrading our communications. We'd like to thank Mr. Simon Fernandes who has worked with us in the last few months to get us into a great flow. If you are subscribed to our Blog, you may have received more posts from us this month. We are doing our best to give you a variety of content and keeping our posts short, so that the updates are useful.
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I would like to share a story from the year 2000 — one that forms part of QMed’s very genesis. That year, I attended my first-ever international conference: the International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), held in London. Before the conference, I took part in a pre conference workshop on Critical Appraisal Skills conducted by the well-known Informationist, Prof. Andrew Booth . I have no hesitation in saying that this was a turning point in my career. Not only did I learn the basics of critical appraisal, but for the first time, I understood that it was possible to search the literature specifically to retrieve evidence-based publications.
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After returning home, I began looking for online courses in this area and was delighted to discover one titled “Searching the Literature for Evidence-Based Medicine.” I immediately enrolled—paying what then felt like a princely sum of around $100 or $120 (I can’t recall exactly). The self-paced eLearning course ran for several weeks and was conducted by three outstanding librarians from the US and the UK. That experience sparked my ongoing journey of learning more and more about this topic over the years.
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Soon after, something interesting happened. The College of Dental Sciences, Davanagere (Karnataka) announced a 1.5-day workshop on Evidence-Based Dentistry. It was, of course, meant for dentists. But I called the department, explained my background, and they kindly invited me to attend. To my surprise, I turned out to be the first person to register for the course! (Not too surprising for the year 2000.) Apparently, the organizers even had to seek help from the Vice-Chancellor of RGUHS to ensure adequate participation.
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What I enjoyed most, naturally, was the session on literature searching. I was the only participant familiar with searching PubMed for relevant and evidence-based literature. There were two international faculty members from Europe, who had only used Medline on CDs and were not yet familiar with PubMed. So everything they wished to do, I had to “translate” into PubMed. It was quite amusing to see postgraduate students watching me in awe!
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This experience underscored a vital point — that in India, literature searching has never received the importance it deserves. Not just back in 2000 or earlier, but even today. We still have a long way to go. And that is exactly what we at QMed are relentlessly pursuing — ensuring that Literature Searching and Referencing are taught with true passion in every health sciences institution in the country.
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A young violinist once asked the world’s greatest teacher to judge his talent. After his passionate performance, the master simply said, “You lack the fire.”
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Heartbroken, the young man quit music and succeeded in business.
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Years later, he met the teacher again and asked how he had known he wasn’t meant for music. The teacher replied, “I tell everyone that—they quit if they lack the fire. If you had the fire, you wouldn’t have listened.”
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it burns despite rejection.
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From our Blog
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Rules, flexibility and empowerment
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Rules are good for every organization. They ensure that most activities are done within a framework. They serve as a guide to all. However, in several smaller organizations, one should see how rules can be flexed (within a right framework and context) and how empowerment and training is important for this. When this is not done, a mid-level / junior …
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Challenges in Patient Care - which information resource helps?
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I love reading blog posts written by Dr SP Kalantri - Prof of Medicine in MGIMS, Sevagram. One very fascinating post was about a young girl who was brought in late night to the hospital - as he describes - "motionless and speechless" His post describes how the residents tried everything they could and then it was a lecturer who …
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How Search Skills Helped an Anesthesiologist Save a Patient’s Limb
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In this guest post, we share a powerful real-life story from Dr. Jitendra Bapat, an anesthesiologist. Dr Bapat had used the PubMed search skills he learned from QMed to find a crucial answer to treat his patient. He describes this as an invaluable experience. Incidentally this also led to his resident presenting this case study at a conference, and winning …
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Do You Know
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Abstrackr: Streamline Your Systematic Reviews
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Conducting systematic reviews can be a daunting task, especially when faced with thousands of citations. Abstrackr, developed by Brown University's Center for Evidence Synthesis in Health, offers a free, open-source solution to simplify this process. Designed to semi-automate the citation screening phase, Abstrackr leverages machine learning to predict the relevance of studies based on titles and abstracts, significantly reducing the …
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AnswerThis.org — A Smart Add-On to Systematic Searching!
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Finding and organizing the right research papers can often take hours — sometimes days. What if you had an assistant that could do part of this for you: finding relevant studies, summarizing them, and even giving you proper citations? That’s what AnswerThis.org (also accessible via answerthis.io) does. It’s an AI-powered research assistant that helps you ask a question or describe …
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Useful Articles
- Swainson A, et al. An interactive, self-guided tutorial on scientific writing for first year physiology students. Curr Res Physiol. 2025;8:100157. doi: 10.1016/j.crphys.2025.100157. PMID: 40809389
- Brito D. How to find the papers you need to read - and avoid the ones you don't. Nature. 2025 doi: 10.1038/d41586-025-02867-2. PMID: 41023490
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QMedCourses News
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Currently we have 7029 participants including 11 institutions and 1965 individuals registered for the courses
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Testimonials for QMedCourses
Course: Information Resources & Literature Searching
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I liked how the lessons were broken down into different videos and that there was a lot of summaries in the videos to help understanding. Also, the images were great to have for visual learners. Shaveen Edirisinghe, UG Student, Cardiff University
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Course: Introduction to Referencing
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The course is quite relevant for me as I am a post graduate student who is in the process of my thesis submission. The course is explained from basics in a simple language and way, which makes understanding easier. Shejin Chatheri, PG Student, Dept Radiation Oncology, Tata Memorial Centre
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How you can engage with us
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