Speaker 1: What's up, everybody? My name is Max Feinstein, and I'm an anesthesiology resident at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In this video series, I'm sharing tips and tricks for doing research based on my own experience that includes a number of grants as well as publications. If you find this video helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you press the like button and subscribe to the channel. In this video, I'm going to be sharing the most important habits and tools that I can recommend for staying on top of primary literature. The reason why this is so important, and it doesn't matter if you're a researcher and or you're a clinician, but staying on top of primary literature is going to be incredibly helpful for your career. If you're a researcher, you're going to have an understanding of what's the most topical research that's happening currently. If you're trying to think of a new research project to do, this is going to be helpful in pointing you in the right direction. If you're already engaged in research, it's going to help you with your literature review. And of course, when you go to write your manuscript and you want to cite the most recent sources, it's very helpful to already have an understanding of what's out there. Now, if you're a clinician, then of course it's helpful to have an understanding of what are the latest practice recommendations, what's the newest research, both in your field and also just more generally in medicine. This is going to help you become a better physician. So I'll just go ahead and illustrate this with a couple of examples. As far as research is concerned, I remember reading new articles that were coming out in the New England Journal about how vaping was associated with an outbreak of deaths in the United States. And at the time, I was looking for a new research project and I started thinking, this is something that potentially could be relevant to the anesthesiologist. So then I went ahead and wrote an article, albeit just a letter to the editor, but it was still a manuscript nonetheless, and I submitted it to an anesthesiology journal and it was published. If I hadn't been staying on top of the latest research, I wouldn't necessarily have known right away that this was going to be a topic that I could write about and submit to journals and it would be relevant to them. Now as far as practicing medicine is concerned, right now we're on the tail end of the COVID pandemic and it was just announced a couple of days ago that a couple of major articles were retracted and these were practice changing articles in the middle of the pandemic. So of course, as I've been treating patients through the pandemic, it's really important to have an understanding of what the latest recommendations are and aren't in terms of what I should be giving my patients. So that's habit number one, just making sure that you're reading regularly, doesn't matter how often it is, just make sure you set aside time to do that. Now habit number two that I recommend is that you read not only about your specialty, but also about just medicine in general. So that means, I'm going to use anesthesiology for an example, instead of just looking at the anesthesiology specific journals, Anesthesia and Analgesia, British Journal of Anesthesia, Anesthesiology, so on and so forth, it's also really important to be looking at the journals that publish general medicine information that's relevant to all physicians. So that's going to be the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and the Lancet are the ones that come to mind for me. And so the idea with that is that it really just broadens your scope in terms of knowledge for being a physician, no matter what your specialty is. Those are my most important habits that I recommend. The biggest question is how do I go about reading all of these articles? And my answer for you, my highest recommendation is that you sign up for a service called Read by QXMD. Now it's free to register, there's a desktop version of the website, and there's also an app that's free. And this is a wonderful resource for looking at the latest primary literature. Now how does it work? It's essentially a manuscript aggregator that puts together a collection of articles based on interests that you have specified. And the best thing about this is how you specify your interests. So I'm going to just go and show you, the website is read.qxmd.com. And once you've gone ahead and registered and logged in, then the first place that you should go is this My Subscriptions button. And this is where you specify what's going to be most important to you. So the first place to start is indicating what specialties you want to follow. And I would highly encourage you to follow not only the specialty that you're interested in, but also other specialties that might be related. So I'll just show you, I follow anesthesiology, of course, because I'm a resident. I'm very interested in bioethics. I'm interested in critical care, internal medicine, medical education. So there are tons of different specialties that you can follow here. And it's as simple as just clicking one of these buttons, and that'll add your specialty. Moving on down, there are collections that you can follow. Now, a lot of these collections are curated by QXMD itself, but there are also a lot of people out there who are just curating their own collections. And to be honest, they do a really great job of putting together really important articles that are great to read if you want to just get background in a certain field or you want to be up to date on the latest trends in a certain field. So I'd recommend going and searching through recommended collections that are here. And then, of course, later you can even create your own collection. Next up is which journals you want to follow. And I personally find this to be the most important part. So if you click all journals, you can see literally every single journal that's out there and you just click on the one that's relevant to you. So you can see that I've got a few selected, the American Journal of Bioethics, I've got some anesthesia journals, so on and so forth. And so here are all the journals that I follow. And again, you can see here that I follow JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine. I need to go ahead and add the Lancet because it's just really important that I'm following general medicine journals in addition to my specialties, my particular interests. And then the last thing on here is what keywords you want to follow. So I've got a specific interest in looking at doximity, there was a paper that I wrote about it and I'd like to see if there are any new papers that come up. So you can just add a keyword here and get notified if there are any articles that come out for something very specific that you're looking for. Okay, so now I'm going to bring you to the front page of Read, which is honestly the best resource that I think is out there for staying on top of primary literature. Because it's so tailored to my interests and it shows me the latest articles. You can see front and center, here's the retracted article about hydroxychloroquine. This is going to be relevant to pretty much anybody practicing medicine on planet Earth right now. And then of course, as I scroll down here, there are going to be articles that are tailored to my interests that I already just showed you. There's also a great app, like I mentioned, that's free from Read by QXMD. It works pretty much the same way. Now the last thing that I want to tell you about Read by QXMD is that it's a really great feature to indicate what institution you're at in case you get institutional access to the journal articles that you're looking at. Because of course, if you go and find something on PubMed, you might not necessarily be able to download the full PDF. Well, the great thing about this is that you can go into my institution. And of course, I'm at Mount Sinai, so I've gone ahead and logged in with that. And so then it routes through the Mount Sinai library, and whenever there's a paper that I want to see, there's a very high likelihood that I'm going to have access to the full version of it. And of course, this is indispensable, because without reading the full paper, I'm not really going to have the full story of what's going on. So that wraps up this video on how to stay on top of primary literature. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any feedback, I'd love to read your comments. You can go ahead and leave them below. Thanks a lot for watching, and I'll see you next time.