The Answer

It has been noted that many high school age students are coming in looking for information on an esoteric disease of one sort or another.  A fun project, if a little macabre.   Well, as always, we have you covered.

1. Come to the reference desk.  We have a few books with descriptions of even the strangest, most rare diseases.
2. Go to the Gale Virtual Reference Library and search a number of medical encyclopedias online.  These are print encyclopedias that have been digitized and put online.
3. PubMed.gov.  PubMed is database of articles put out by the National Library of Medicine.  It is a truly outstanding resource, but many of the articles are doctors writing for doctors.  If you are only interested in fulltext articles be sure to click on Free Fulltext after performing your search.
4. MedlinePlus.gov.  Another government website.  It is designed for a nonprofessional.  A very useful website.
5. Ask for help!  We are more than happy to help you find information in a variety of other resources.

Hopefully this will get you started!

PubMed

Medline makes up the largest part of the PubMed database.  A link to a good overview of PubMed can be found on the home page. PubMed offers powerful searching. You can search or limit by author, title, journal, date, MeSH heading, language, gender, age, publication type, full text availability. For detailed explanations,  you can read the help page, FAQ screen or take the search tutorials; links are on the home page or you can check the QuickStart page. Search results can be displayed in different formats that you select from a pull-down menu. Most citations also have links to related articles. Via a Links icon next to the citation/abstract, PubMed will take you to free or fee sources of the full text of participating journals if they are available. Along with access to full text articles, PubMed also offers access to a growing collection of biomedical textbooks. PubMed is referred to on its web site as Entrez PubMed. “Entrez” refers to the date that a citation is added to the database, as opposed to the actual publication date of the article.

Medline

There are many medical web sites available and  some times it’s hard to know which one to use.  It depends on what you are looking for.  Journal articles make up an extremely important category of the medical literature because they contain the latest research. MEDLINE is one of the best National Library of Medicine’s electronic database that contains over 16 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. All records are indexed with NLM’s Medical Subject Headings.

Over 5200 journals are currently indexed by Medline. Most records are from English-language sources or have English abstracts. It is the most valuable database for medical research, especially for current information.

Links to Medline can also be found on other sites, such as those of medical libraries. Skokie Public Library has an access to Medline through the First Search Databases. You need to remember that not all Medline links are the same. Some do not provide a link to the NLM site and all its search features; instead they may offer less powerful searching. Read the web site’s description to determine exactly how much Medline is offered. Medline can be searched from 2 NLM web sites, PubMed and NLM Gateway.