Hey everyone!
As 2025 well and truly establishes itself, we thought we’d update you on some of the progress over the past two months, in our usual bi-monthly fashion.
Major Milestones
- We are readily approaching 1000 subscribers to the Malleus deck, which is exciting and goes to show we are reaching more medical students and JMOs.
- Tracking topic progress against the PassMed high-yield textbook:
- To better achieve our goal of ensuring we feel comfortable that we have covered topics to a sufficient depth to match that expected of a final year medical student/intern, we have decided to target the content to map the PassMed “High Yield” textbook, which has been a readily used UK-based MCQ deck for many years now.
- This Google document Malleus Alignment with PassMed Database will outline our progress in this regard (feel free to assign your AnkiHub username to certain topics you would like to contribute to!)
- We have also recruited a fourth core member to the Malleus Executive who has been participating in our fortnightly meetings consistently over the past while:
Deck Updates
- Total updates (accepted suggestions) in the last 30 days: 1685
- Deck Stats: Just shy of 3000 cards now!
- New card-styling*
- Thanks to some great work by one of our new maintainers @mrvhyte, we now have some new note-type styling in the works, building on our existing adapted AnKing Overhaul note-type
-
We recently performed a poll on the discord and it was the majority opinion to maintain the current centred-text formatting rather than a new proposal to trial a left-inclined paragraph style
-
As a result, we intend to keep the centred-text style, with options to allow to change this easily in the nodetype
-
New randomisation feature (beta-testing)*
- Our seasoned Malleus Maintainer’s @sabicool and @alexlewis have been working on a great new note-type to the deck which allows for a randomisation feature to be implemented to certain cards within Anki
- The prototype (below) opens up new possibilities for testing understanding of content like GCS, classification of osteoporosis according to T score and interpretation of blood gases in a novel format whereby every time the card is attempted, a new set of random parameters is set to actually test application, rather than memory of certain clinical tools (see GIF below)
- New topics include:
- Workup and management of hypertension in pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia, eclampsia and pre-existing hypertension
- Expanded pharmacology of key drugs including carbamazepine and 2nd generation antipsychotics, mapped to AMH
- More ECG cards as we continue to slowly integrate this wonderful deck (ECG Wave Maven - Now in Anki! : r/medicalschoolanki) into Malleus
- More Talley & O’Connor cards on various clinical conditions
- New cards on broad “on call” scenarios as outlined in Marshall & Ruedy’s On Call: Principles & Protocols ANZ (3e) including chest pain, anaphylaxis, dyspnoea and medical ethics
- You can always check the full list of the updates by clicking on the ‘AnkiHub’ → ‘Updated Since Last Review’ button on the upper left hand side of the browser within Anki
- *Note that we are readily awaiting note-type editing as a feature within AnkiHub before rolling this out to users (we have been advised this is coming very soon)
Website Updates
- Ongoing amendments to various pages including but not limited to:
- Ensuring consistency in the use of *General pages being entirely “topics” rather than previously there being exceptions with general
- Expanding the use of multiple parents to allow for tags to be brought across multiple databases when taking tags from the #Textbooks and #OSCEs_&_Clinical_Reasoning databases (makes card creation more efficient)
Plugin Updates
Special thanks to @sabicool for ongoing enhancements to our plugins! 
- Fuzzy searching and common abbreviation expansions (e.g. cardio → cardiology). For example searching “resp infection” will bring up all the infections of the respiratory system (e.g.pneumonia, tuberculosis, lung abscess)
- You’ll also notice that we added emojis to the icons to represent different types of pages:
→ general/topic pages (e.g. fluid management), 
→ subject/disease pages (e.g. heat stroke), 
→ pharmacological class pages (e.g. calcium channel blockers) and 
→ for individual drugs (e.g. amlodipine) - Added configurable keyboard shortcut to open the page selector. Defaults to “Control + Alt + M” or “Command + Option + M”. You can change it in the configuration page for the addon.
- Added pop-up for subtag selector to be filled out when adding tags for “disease” pages. “Topic” pages under *General tags do not require subtags and can be added with the subtag selector empty. This will hopefully minimise confusion and improve tagging of the database.
- Implemented autosearch that searches as you type with a delay before starting the search. Please change the search_delay property based off your typing speed. You can also turn off autosearch by setting the autosearch property to false
- Minor bug fixes
- Minor bug fixes.
Community Shoutouts
Huge thanks to the contributors making the Malleus deck stronger every day!
Top Reviewers of the Week (as of 23/03/25):
- @sayuru: 2137 reviews
(this is scary… your wrist must be sore!) - @lcookie93: 1862 reviews
- @Megaminz: 1463 reviews
- @sumzee: 1212 reviews
- @jr16523: 1174 reviews
Keep smashing those spacebars! 
Partnerships & Collaboration
Our aim over the coming weeks is to continue to promote the deck and our mission to medical students while still maintaining our complete independence and open-source not-for-profit vision:
- Australian Medical Students’ Association (AMSA): Collaboration with their Medical Education team is ongoing.
Wrapping Up
Thank you to everyone who’s submitted a card or suggested a change over the past few months (you know who you are!)! It makes the deck even better, and helps contribute to our ultimate goal of creating the best clinical medicine resource for Australian and New Zealand medical students yet. We of course welcome all suggestions about the project, even if it’s just suggestions on what content you want cards on 
.
Website: malleus.org.au
Discord: Join Us
Facebook: Follow Us
YouTube: Subscribe
Email: president@malleus.org.au | stapediusau@gmail.com
See you in the May update later this year!
Kind regards,
Stapedius & The Malleus Team 
