Electrophysiology Fellow

Cardiac electrophysiology fellow with an interest in the familial, words, and the history of electrophysiology.

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Searching tips

Obox Signature Series

Tip for AV dissociation

From the boss:

"When you're searching for a needle in 12 haysticks, where do you look first? The smallest haystack."

The best advice is obvious – especially when you are practiced in ignoring the obvious.

Something to memorize...

"Nodoventricular (NV) bypass tracts were described pathologically in 1937 by Mahaim and Benatt. Later, fibres connecting the AV node and the right bundle branch - nodo-fascicular (NF) - were recognised. Now it is known that the majority of clinically apparent bypass tracts thought to be NV or NF, are actually slowly conducting atrio-ventricular or atrio-fascicular pathways. True NV or NF tracts are extremely rare."

Google Trick for Science Search

While specialised search engines will always have their place, I find myself drifting more and more toward google for the thorough, 'all document' search. Here is a simple example - I want to know if SCN2A (the gene encoding the Nav1.1 channel) has been expressed in HeLa cells. My first destination is PubMed:

- SCN1A HeLa → 1 result, a 'false' positive

Next, I'll try google:

- SCN1A HeLa → 6070 results

Far too many to search through. Most of the results appear to be mentions of one or both words on the same web page.

If I think about what I am actually search for it is: "We expressed SCN1A in HeLa cells…". I could search for that exact expression (0 results), but I know that there are a hundred different ways of saying the same thing. I would like to search for all those web pages where SCN1A is in the same sentence as HeLa cells. There is at least one commercial solution out there - the excellent DevonAgent, which I suggest is worth a look. But a similar, though limited, functionality is available in Google.

- "SCN1A * HeLa" → 1 result, a 'false' positive

(Enter with the quotation marks). This produces all the webpages with SCN2A preceding HeLa in the same sentence; of course HeLa may precede SCN2A, so I also need to enter the search phrase:

- "HeLa * SCN1A" → 0 results

This gives me some confidence that SCN1A has probably not been expressed in HeLa cells; at least not documented to have been expressed. I realise that this method may result in some misses - when HeLa and SCN1A are split by a single period for instance. But it is a far better method than the standard google search and has many uses beyond science. 

I hope for the day when one can supply a search modification in the google search bar along the lines of 'search for these two words, and only return those webpages where they are within [x] words of each other'.