About UpToDate

UpToDate provides access to original, evidence-based, peer reviewed medical information with a practical focus. Topic reviews are provided by physician experts which address each clinical problem thoroughly yet concisely.

Getting started

Open the Databases on the UTAS Library home page and navigate to UpToDate, click to open:

Click Accept and you will be taken to the Home page of UpToDate:

Note the Help link which provides access to an very good Tutorial and to the full Help Manual of  UpTo Date

Specifying a search phrase

Use the New Search box to specify a search phrase, which can consist of one or more terms. Possible search terms include — but are not limited to — names of diseases, symptoms, laboratory abnormalities, procedures, drugs, and classes of drugs.

The more specific you are about the information that you want to search for, the more likely it is that the search process will return the desired results. For example, if you want to find information about how to treat hypertension in pregnancy, specifying treatment of hypertension in pregnancy as your search phrase will most likely be more productive than specifying only hypertension.

If you want to clear the contents of the New Search box so that you can enter a different search phrase, click the Clear button.
After you have specified the desired search phrase, click the Go button to initiate the search.

Accessing topics from the Search Results page

After you enter the search phrase in the New Search box and click the Go button, UpToDate performs the search and displays the results on the Search Results page, as shown in the following example.

You can click directly on the title of a topic in the Search Results list to display the topic.

You can also position the mouse pointer over a topic title to display a preview of the topic outline for that topic. This allows you to quickly scan the contents of different topics by moving the mouse pointer over the topic titles. In the following example, the mouse pointer has been placed over the title of the “Management of hypertension in pregnancy” topic to display its topic outline at the right side of the page.

Each heading in the topic outline preview is linked to the corresponding section of the topic. Thus, you can click on a heading in the topic outline preview to directly access a specific part of the topic.

Using topic outlines

When you display a topic in UpToDate, the topic outline for that topic appears at the left side of the page.

You can click on a section heading in the outline to directly access the corresponding part of the topic, as shown in the following example.

Article References listed at the end of topics are also directly linked to Medline to provide Abstract information

Searching for drug information

UpToDate includes the Lexi-Comp drug information database. You can search for a drug name in the New Search Box or click on a hyperlinked drug name in a topic article.

UpToDate also provides access to Lexi-Interact from its main search page.

The Contents tab on the main search page also provides useful hyperlinks for What's new information and for Patient handouts.

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