In May 2021 a young doctor - Vinayak Mishra - approached QMed. He had completed his medical degree and experienced that it was difficult to get mentors if he wanted to author a systematic review. He asked us if he could work on a collaborative project with us where QMed would take care of its major area of helping with the search strategies and he would coordinate with senior mentors and help students to author reviews. We started off in earnest. We currently have two groups of authors - medical students - working on two separate reviews.  Vinayak created groups,…

For quite long I had assumed that since PubMed Central (PMC for short) was included in PubMed, one did not have to search the PMC database - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ - separately. PMC is an "archive" of free biomedical and life sciences journal articles. Journal articles are added and archived in PMC from three sources Journal publishers / Publishing societiesAuthor manuscripts deposited by authors - as mandated by fundersDigitization projects - where NLM has collaborated with publishers to archive historical literature - scanning articles and preserving them From June 2020, PMC has also started including preprints that report NIH funded results So…

In my last post I had mentioned that when we worked with researchers engaged with research projects for the Lancet Citizens' Commission, we observed that if they had approached us earlier we may have saved them lots more time. After my last post, one of them mentioned - "If we had started working with you earlier, we may have made lots more progress by now!"  That was a really precious, reaffirming comment. It just confirms to us that the earlier these skills are picked up, medical research gets better, with lots of time saved. And we are really happy that more…