Okay, Medline is not all crap and useless. If you know how to use it, you'll be on your way to finding relevant articles faster than you can say "weapons of mass destruction."
I'll post a quick guide to using Medline, the way I use it (as I'm sure other people will have their own ways):
- Firstly, for those who have no idea - go to the library's home page -
www.lib.uts.edu.au and click 'databases.' You'll then see all the different disciplines you can search. The one I hilight is: "Biological & Biomedical Sciences."
- Now click that button down bottom that says "Find Resources" and you're on your way. When your results come up, scroll down to "Medline - 1966 to Present with Daily Update" and click the link. You should
now see the Medline home page that you can search from.
- So, the OP wanted to search about spinal cord injuries - thus we'll use this as our example (even though I'm sure it's much too late to help with the assignment, too bad).
The most effieient way I search for articles is to search by "Title" only. If you search by "Keyword," chances are you'll get random articles that you don't want, and have to filter out all the subjects you're not interested in. Therefore, we type "spinal cord injuries" or "spinal cord injury" into the search bar and click "Title" - this searches for all articles with the search term in the actual title of the journal article.
- Then, to gain access to any particular article, click the "SFX" icon to the right of the article you're interested in and wait for the new popup window to load. If UTS subscribes to that publication, you'll see a list of sources you can get the full text article from. Click that little round "GO" button and you're in!
I hope this helps, as Medline really is not useless - it just takes a little to get used to and it helps if you have someone showing you.
As a final note - if there's any particular journal you're after access to (for example, the "Journal of Biological Chemistry", you can go directly to the library's catalogue and search for it there under "Journal Title" -
http://linus.lib.uts.edu.au/ or
http://orac.lib.uts.edu.au/