Dr. Amit Gefen 2001-2

Introduction to Biomedical Engineering

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

The goal of this assignment is to familiarize you with using the resources at the Exact Sciences and Engineering Library and the Life Sciences and Medicine Library at Tel Aviv University. You will need the experience acquired during preparation of this assignment when carrying out your final project in this course. The assignment will not only familiarize you with a very important tool at your disposal, MEDLINE, but is also intended to develop some skills of investigative digging in the libraries.

 MEDLINE can be accessed through the World Wide Web (WWW) at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

1.Using MEDLINE find articles by the author Nordin M in 1998. Find the articles about low back pain. Write down the citations of these articles. 2.Pick a topic of interest to you in Medicine or Biomedical Engineering and do a MEDLINE search on it. Start with the most general search possible and get more specific with each successive search. Play around with different search options. The search instructions found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query/static/help/pmhelp.html#Index are pretty helpful and are a good place to start. Narrow your search in whatever way you like, depending on what is most interesting to you. Summarize your results, but do NOT turn in a printout of all the references MEDLINE provides. Instead, turn in a summarizing Table as in the following example: Command Results (# Ref.) LUNG 330297 LUNG and EMPHYSEMA 7588 LUNG and EMPHYSEMA and MODEL 259 LUNG and EMPHYSEMA and MODEL and STRESS 8 Narrow down your topic to less than ten key articles of interest, through successive search commands, as shown above. List those articles (a MEDLINE printout is fine, but it must be 10 references or less). Next to each reference, indicate whether or not the Exact Sciences and Engineering Library and the Life Sciences and Medicine Libraries at Tel Aviv University carry that particular journal.

Due: within two weeks from distribution