I'm actually a big believer that reading Blueprints plus reading about your patients is enough to do well on just about any shelf exam, and get honors in any rotation.
IM - Blueprints for internal medicine is particularly good in my opinion, and if you read that plus uptodate.com or emedicine.com on particular issues that come up with your patients, you'll be golden! Up To Date is great too in that it'll put big trial data right at your fingertips, in a well-organized way. So, for example, when you have a patient with a.fib and your residents are discussing whether or not they need to be anticoagulated, and if it should be with warfarin or aspirin, you can spout something off about the SPAF trial and impress them. 😉
Peds - Although our course director said Blueprints for peds wasn't sufficient, that was the only book I used, plus I read about my patients on uptodate or emedicine.com.
Family Med - we don't have a shelf exam for family med (does one exist??), and they provided us with books, so I can't really comment on this one
OB/Gyn - this was my first rotation, and I made the mistake of thinking that I'd retain everything I read from the huge Beckmann's book. It's a great book, but it's WAY too detailed. My classmates pretty universally said once again that Blueprints was the way to go for OB/Gyn. I'm thinking about buying it for board review purposes.
Psych - I'm doing psych right now, and the course director wanted us to get this huge book by Andreasen. I bought a used copy from Amazon.com and have used it quite a bit, but I still think the Blueprints book is the best. It looks way too short, but it's actually VERY good...I'm reading the chapter on antipsychotics now, and it's very up to date and contains all the info I've been pimped on about these drugs. The book seems to cover all the major topics covered in the huge psychiatry text, only in a degree of detail that is actually reasonable for you to remember after reading it once.
Surgery - I don't know...that's my next rotation. Everyone here uses Surgical Recall.
Make sure you get the newer versions of Blueprints, because they now have shelf-like questions in the back, which I found to be reasonable representative of realistic questions...they're good for practice/review.
Many of my classmates are really into the Appleton & Lange question books. Personally, I think they're a waste of time and money. I've found them to be way too detailed, and the questions are very unlike the actual shelf exam questions. I also find that after reading about my patients' issues, I really don't have time to do more than read a text like Blueprints.
I hope that's helpful. And remember, always always ALWAYS read about your patients!
Good luck! 🙂
