This resource review evaluates SUMSearch (formerly SmartSearch) (figure 1), which was developed by Robert Badgett and internal medicine colleagues at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, and the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed Medline interface. In evaluating these tools we considered the following clinical scenario:

A middle aged, otherwise healthy businessman presents with flu symptoms. Having listened to the debate around the new antiviral drugs for influenza you conduct a “quick and clean” search for the treatment of influenza with zanamivir.

PubMed (figure 2) is a free Internet interface to the Medline biomedical database for clinicians from all health care disciplines …