ICS 1-3 EIP Tutorial

A fully functional system for storing and organizing clinical information will make your student and professional lives a LOT easier!   You will need to be able to refer back to research for patient education, or communicating with a care team of other professionals.  Starting your own personalized reference library of useful resources is something that you need to consider to save yourself time and help you build your body of knowledge.

As a reminder, a citation brings together all the elements necessary to uniquely identify a published item. Many free and fee-based tools are available, but no one tool does it all. Here are several components of a well-rounded information management system:

• Citation Managers: Save and organize research articles/PDFs; annotate articles by highlighting sections of interest and adding your own notes; generate reference lists (bibliographies) and format citations for you papers in AMA, APA, and other styles. Newer tools, such as Mendeley, also provide a research collaboration component, allowing you to share articles of interest and see what articles others are posting.

   For further info and options, check out:

Citation Managers Comparison (U of Wisconsin)

• Individual database accounts: Many databases allow you to set up an account to save your searches and selected studies, for example PubMed's MyNCBI.

• Note taking and archiving resources: Primarily used for creating and managing your notes, e.g. for classes, your Clinic Notebook, and saving clips (parts) of websites; examples: EverNote, and OneNote. 

BU Librarians recommend and support Mendeley 

There are other tools and approaches.  Whatever you choose, make sure you're consistent and accurate to save yourself time and avoid unintentional plagiarism 

See the colorful table for a quick look at what Mendeley, a citation manager, can do that OneNote or EverNote, which are note-taking/web clipping tools, can't.