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FOAMS earch.net: A custom search engine for emergency medicine and critical care
Author(s) -
Raine Todd,
Thoma Brent,
Chan Teresa M,
Lin Michelle
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
emergency medicine australasia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.602
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1742-6723
pISSN - 1742-6731
DOI - 10.1111/1742-6723.12404
Subject(s) - medicine , the internet , medical emergency , mainstream , health care , quality (philosophy) , medical education , world wide web , computer science , philosophy , theology , epistemology , economics , economic growth
Abstract The number of online resources read by and pertinent to clinicians has increased dramatically. However, most healthcare professionals still use mainstream search engines as their primary port of entry to the resources on the Internet. These search engines use algorithms that do not make it easy to find clinician‐oriented resources. FOAMS earch, a custom search engine ( CSE ), was developed to find relevant, high‐quality online resources for emergency medicine and critical care ( EMCC ) clinicians. Using Google TM algorithms, it searches a vetted list of >300 blogs, podcasts, wikis, knowledge translation tools, clinical decision support tools and medical journals. Utilisation has increased progressively to >3000 users/month since its launch in 2011. Further study of the role of CSEs to find medical resources is needed, and it might be possible to develop similar CSEs for other areas of medicine.