Medline/PUBMED
A quiet revolution occurred in medical information access in 1997 when Medline became free public access.  Prior to this, Medline abstracts were available only through paid subscriptions.  Medline provides search capability of journal articles dating back to 1966. Although Medline provides only abstracts of articles, it is a valuable adjunct to print resources.  For example, a Medline search can be used to find articles available in the surgeon's personal or community library.

A Medline adjunct is J.A.D.E (Journal Abstracts Medline Delivered Electronically) (32). Subscribers enter their email address and Medline search term to this service, and receive a weekly email of Medline references and abstracts archived within the previous week. For a hand surgeon, a J.A.D.E. request using the search term arm[MeSH Major Topic] will retrieve articles with a major theme involving the upper arm and all distal structures. This term is too broad to be useful for general searches, but when limited to articles archived in a one week period, it produces a tolerable volume of  about 15 citations per week. Alternatively, the same search of upper extremity citations archived within the last week could be run manually with the following somewhat cumbersome link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=search&term=("arm"[MeSH+Major+Topic])&db=PubMed&orig_db=PubMed&filters=on&pmfilter_EDatLimit=7+Days&dispmax=500&doptcmdl=Abstract
but J.A.D.E. does this automatically.