RCSI Library blog

60 new electronic books 24/7

2012-01-04T11:28:00.006Z

The Library has a new subscription to Access Medicine, a collection of 60 electronic books.

To ensure you can connect on or off campus, use the link to Access Medicine on the Digests and EBooks page on the Library website.

About Access Medicine

AccessMedicine^® from McGraw-Hill is an innovative online resource that provides access to more than 60 medical titles from the best minds in medicine, updated content, thousands of images and illustrations, interactive self-assessment, case files, time-saving diagnostic and point-of-care tools, a comprehensive search platform, and the ability to view from and download content to a mobile device.

Some of the ebooks included in Access Medicine are:

· Harrison's Online

· CURRENT Medical Diagnosis & Treatment 2012

· Hurst's The Heart, 13e

· Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology, 9e

· DeGowin's Diagnostic Examination, 9e

· Fitzpatrick's Color Atlas & Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology, 6e

· Fitzpatrick's Dermatology in General Medicine, 7e

· Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 12e

· Hazzard's Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, 6e

· Lichtman's Atlas of Hematology

· Principles of Critical Care, 3e

· Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, 9e

· Sherris Medical Microbiology, 5e

· Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide, 7e

· Williams Gynecology

· Williams Hematology, 8e

· Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry, 28e

· Smith's General Urology, 17e

PubMed and MedlinePlus on your phone

2011-12-15T08:56:00.002Z

PubMed Mobile

Provides a simplified, mobile-friendly Web interface to access PubMed and MedlinePlus from smartphones. Goto The US National Library of Medicine's information page about mobile access and apps.

Google Scholar Citations

2011-12-13T09:16:00.003Z

Google Scholar Citations

A few months ago, Google introduced a limited release of Google Scholar Citations, a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time. Now this service available to everyone.

Here’s how it works: you can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, Google collects citations to your articles, graphs them over time, and computes your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

RCSI's Research Repository e-publications@RCSI

2011-11-25T13:41:00.006Z

e-publications@RCSI is RCSI's repository of its published research. It has been visited over 50,000 times and the research works downloaded most frequently are:

The Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life (SEIQoL): a Direct Weighting procedure for Quality of Life Domains (SEIQoL-DW). Ciaran O'Boyle, John Browne, Anne Hickey, Hannah McGee, and CRB Joyce

A Guide to Hospital Outpatient Satisfaction Surveys. Practical Recommendations and the Satisfaction with Outpatient Services (SWOPS) Questionnaire Orla Keegan and Hannah McGee

Overseas nurse recruitment: Ireland as an illustration of the dynamic nature of nurse migration. Niamh Humphries, Ruairi Brugha, and Hannah McGee

Dying in hospital in Ireland: an assessment of the quality of care in the last week of life: National audit of end-of-life care in hospitals in Ireland, 2008/9 Kieran McKeown, Trutz Haase, Jonathan Pratschke, Shelagh Twomey, Helen Donovan, and Feline Engling

The SAVI Report: Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland. Executive Summary Hannah McGee, Rebecca Garavan, Mairead de Barra, Joanne Byrne, and Ronan Conroy

Globalethics

2011-11-25T10:17:00.003Z

Globethics.net is a global network of persons and institutions interested in various fields of applied ethics. It offers access to a large number of resources on ethics, especially through its leading global digital ethics library and facilitates collaborative web-based research, conferences, online publishing and information sharing.

Lots of fulltext resources available. Free personal registration.

The best medical books?

2011-11-25T09:48:00.004Z

Browse the best 800 books on medical subjects

Medical Core Collection at LibraryThing

SciVerse Scopus

2011-10-27T11:44:00.003+01:00

SciVerse Scopus

SciVerse Scopus is a major abstract and citation database which rivals Web of Science in scope and scale. Indexes scientific, technical, medical and social sciences fields.

45.5 million records, 100% of Medline and Embase
Indexes 19,500 journals, conference papers and books
strong coverage of pharmacology and European journals
24.7 million patent records from five patent offices
author Identifier to automatically match an author’s work including the h-index.
Citation Tracker to simply find, check and track citations in real-time.

Celebrating medicine in literature

2011-10-27T08:55:00.002+01:00

The Wellcome Trust Book Prize celebrates the best of medicine in literature by awarding £25 000 each year for the finest fiction or non-fiction book centred around medicine.

On these pages you can read about this year's competition and about previous winning books. With the Book Prize, Wellcome Trust aims to stimulate interest, excitement and debate about medicine and literature, reaching audiences not normally engaged with medical science.

What works? PubMed Health

2011-10-14T14:30:00.001+01:00

About PubMed Health

PubMed Health specializes in reviews of clinical effectiveness research, with easy-to-read summaries for consumers as well as full technical reports. Clinical effectiveness research finds answers to the question “What works?” in medical and health care. PubMed Health is based on systematic reviews of clinical trials. These clinical effectiveness reviews can show what treatments and prevention methods have been proven to work—and what remains unknown.

PubMed Health provides summaries and full texts of selected systematic reviews in one place. The reviews were generally published or updated from 2003. A search on PubMed Health runs simultaneously in PubMed. A filter is used to identify all the indexed scientific articles at the National Library of Medicine that might be systematic reviews.

Information partners selected by PubMed Health to contribute their clinical effectiveness information are:
• Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (US) (AHRQ)
• The Cochrane Collaboration (CC)
• German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG)
• National Health Service (NHS) National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR HTA)
• National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines program (NICE)

The library on Moodle

2011-10-06T14:45:00.008+01:00

Information Seeking and Library Skills

This is a course area on Moodle open to all RCSI users with information about:

Library Journals, books and databases
Find journal articles using databases like Medline and Web of Science
Access and links to journal articles
Guides to our electronic books amd medical digests
How to cite and format references and bibilographies
Using the EndNote reference manager application
Quality healthcare resources in various subjects

Group Study Rooms

2011-09-27T10:32:00.000+01:00

The Mercer Library Group Study Rooms are provided for the use of groups of 2-14 students.

There are five group study rooms in the Mercer Library
The time period is one hour
Students may book two sessions per day
Bookings are accepted three days in advance
Rooms are not soundproofed, so discussion must be at a quiet conversational level

Bookings can be made at the Service Desk in the Mercer Library.

Trip: Evidence Based Database

2011-08-23T10:45:00.009+01:00

RCSI Library provides access to the major evidence based synopses UpToDate, DynaMed and Clinical Evidence as the core of our clinical information collection.

The Trip Database complements these clinical digests and the service has been recently redesigned and enhanced. Trip's simple search function retrieves evidence based results which are clearly distinguished by synopses sources, systematic reviews and guidelines by country. There are direct links to related search results filtered by Clinical Queries in Medline, to British National Formulary entries and to a variety of CME resources.

Registration for Trip is free.

Wellcome Library launches historic Arabic medical manuscripts online

2011-07-29T11:02:00.003+01:00

The Wellcome Library has launched Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online, a digital manuscript library created in partnership with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College London Department of Digital Humanities.

The resource is now available online: http://wamcp.bibalex.org/

More details can be found in the Wellcome Trust press release: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2011/WTVM052282.htm

2010 Journal Citation Reports now available

2011-07-21T15:58:00.003+01:00

The latest Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for 2010 are now available. They provide a combination of impact and influence metrics, and millions of cited and citing journal data points that comprise the complete journal citation network of Web of Science. The 2010 JCR includes:

• 10,000 + of the world's most highly cited peer reviewed journals
• Nearly 2,500 publishers and 84 countries represented
• Over 1,300 regional journals
• 1,075 journals receiving their first Journal Impact Factor

RCSI users access JCR via the library's databases page.

Medscape Mobile apps

2011-07-21T15:31:00.006+01:00

Medscape from WebMD is a comprehensive medical website for healthcare professionals.

Medscape includes:

- Fast & Comprehensive Drug Reference
- Drug Interaction Checker
- In-depth Disease & Condition Reference and Treatment Guide
- Procedures Reference
- Tables & Protocols Reference

Free self-registration required.

Medscape’s FREE app now available for Apple and for Android.

Patient care guidelines app

2011-07-21T15:04:00.003+01:00

Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network SIGN

Hundreds of guidelines on patient care are available at SIGN

Also available now as iPhone, iPad and Android app

http://www.sign.ac.uk/guidelines/apps/index.html

Springer offers free access to research articles on E. coli bacteria

2011-06-03T16:43:00.001+01:00

Springer Science+Business Media is offering all journal articles and book chapters which deal with the E. coli bacteria free of charge on its online information platform http://www.springerlink.com. The articles can be found by using the search terms “Enterohaemorrhagic and Escherichia and coli” or by using the link http://www.springer.com/ehec. A total of over 400 scientific articles are available to print out or download from now until 1 September 2011.

Where to publish?

2011-04-08T13:53:00.007+01:00

SCImago

Many authors use Journal Citation Reports from Web of Science to find journals in a field and to get their impact factor. You can also use SCImago to find journal rankings and comparisions in all major reseaech areas.

Where does the Journal of Liposome Resarch stand in the field of pharmacology journals?
How does Ireland compare with the European average for journal papers published in pharmacology?
How many papers were published in neuroscience in the past five years and how many were never cited?
Has the level of international collaboration among Irish researchers increased?

All this and more at SCImago - published by Elsevier

Uniquely you - ResearcherID

2011-03-29T16:01:00.010+01:00

Variants in the published form of personal and institutional names can adversely impact research ratings and bibliometrics. Consistency in the form of author name used ensures full credit for all published work.

ResearcherID is one service that uniquely identifies researchers worldwide and intregrates with Web of Science. There are over 540 Irish researchers using ResearcherID at present.

Personal registration is free: ResearcherID will display all your Web of Science publications, citations, collaborations and metrics.

Standards for systematic reviews

2011-03-28T10:58:00.008+01:00

Systematic assessment of the comparative effectiveness of medical or surgical interventions is the basis of evidence based decision making.

Finding What Works in Health Care is a new set of standards for researchers who wish to conduct systematic reviews.

Produced by the US Institute of Medicine, the standards cover how to initiate a review, finding and assessing studies, synthesizing the evidence has released and reporting results.

My RI - your Research Impact

2011-03-23T10:13:00.012Z

My RI - my research impact

An open access toolkit to support bibliometrics training and awareness. This package of resources includes videos, quizzes and an online tutorial In 3 modules: introductory overview; journal ranking; bibliometrics to support your career and research strategy.

A DCU, DIT, DCU, NUIM collaboration.

Publish or Perish analyzes Google Scholar citations

2011-01-31T12:36:00.005Z

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• The contemporary h-index
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

Publish or Perish (PoP) is designed to empower academics to present their own research impact to advantage. Each discipline or research field has different publication patterns and arguably the established citation indexes Web of Science and Scopus comprehensively harvest bibliometic information from science, technology and medicine. However Publish or Perish does offer researchers another option to calculate research performance using Google Scholar data.

The Publish or Perish website has a variety of interesting papers and reports about citation and bibliometrics. PoP is free to download from the site.

Over 700 free healthcare eBooks at NCBI

2011-01-31T10:31:00.003Z

Access Full Text Life Science and Healthcare Texts Using A New NCBI Bookshelf Homepage

The NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) has released a new version of their "Bookshelf" homepage.

The Bookshelf provides access to more than 770 free (full-text) items including biomedical textbooks, other scientific titles, some genetic resources, such as Gene Review, and NCBI help manuals.

To the Bookshelf

Search our electronic books in the catalogue

2011-01-10T16:11:00.005Z

RCSI Library now has hundreds of electronic books in surgery, medicine and pharmacology.

You can search a separate subset of the main catalogue to find our electronic books.

Go to the catalogue http://library.rcsi.ie choose
Other RCSI Library Catalogues and select the eBooks

Who is JANE?

2010-12-22T10:54:00.007Z

JANE is the Journal/Author Name Estimator

If you have recently prepared a paper, can you find recommended journals to submit it to?
Or maybe as a final check on your work, can you browse closely related papers?
Or as an editor, can you find related qualified reviewers?

Paste any title or abstract into the search area and JANE will find the best matching authors, papers or journals.

JANE is here

BIOSEMANTICS has developed various knowledge management tools in the biomolecular field.

Social Media and the Medical Profession

2010-12-07T08:56:00.004Z

Social media and the medical profession

A guide to online professionalism for practioners and students.

A joint initiative of the Australian and New Zealand Medical Associations, this site offers advice and resources about emerging issues in the use of social media.

Evidence is emerging about the risks for medical professionals in engaging with social media. Online behaviours can impact upon professional integrity, professional relationships and employment opportunities. Perceptions of professional behaviour must evolve to encompass new social media.

RCSI Library supporting Beaumont Hospital staff learning

2010-11-26T15:00:00.002Z

Thank you to all hospital staff who applied for the Library Sponsorship Prize.
The prize includes:

books from your reading list
free inter library loans
information skills tutorials
stationery

We are delighted to announce the winner is:

Lisa White

Project Manager, Organisational Development

Lisa is studying for an MSc in Organisational Change and Leadership.

The Library on Moodle

2010-11-04T09:19:00.005Z

Visit the Library on Moodle

Information Seeking and Library Skills

This area is open to all RCSI Moodle users for all you need to know about

Referencing and citation
Journals
PubMed and other Medlines
Web of Science citation index
Embase
Evidence based digests
EndNote

FInd it @ RCSI Library

2010-10-06T11:50:00.000+01:00

1. I have found the abstract (summary) of a really good article and I have the full reference (volume and page numbers) – where do I go to find the full text?

2. I have to find information on the overuse of medication, which database should I use to find articles on the topic?

3. Google gives me loads of irrelevant sites – biased, commercial – is there an alternative?

Looking for answers to these or similar questions?

Ask us at the Service Desks in the Mercer and Beaumont Hospital Libraries.

Email us at library@rcsi.ie

Explore the Library’s website :

Ejournal portal to link through to the full-text of articles

Databases page to find articles on a topic

Ebooks page for the full text of a large range of electronic textbooks and digests

Library guide for opening hours and staff contacts

Sign up to the Information & Library Skills section on Moodle for lots of support on searching the web, using databases to find articles, doing literature reviews and using citation styles

Keep an eye on the Library blog for lots of information

Answers:
1. Use the Ejournal Portal on the Library’s website
2. The Medline and Embase databases include articles on biomedical and healthcare topics – see the databases page on the Library’s website
3. Try using Scirus – a search engine which focuses on government, healthcare, academic, technical websites

New eBooks at RCSI Library

2010-09-08T15:03:00.007+01:00

We have bought hundreds of new eBooks

New basic and advanced level books in specialist areas, especially Pharmacology, Psychiatry, Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics.

Clinical Pharmacology
Drug Facts
Dosage Calculations
Medication Administration
Handbook of Pharmacology

Primary Sports Medicine
Fractures
Spine, Hip, Knee, Elbow, Foot, Hand, Shoulder
Pain Management
Musculoskeletal Disorders
Surgery Manuals
Trauma
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Psychopharmacotherapy
Psychiatric Therapeutics
Neuropsychopharmacology
Medical Psychiatry Quick Reference

Connect to our eBooks page

Available on and off campus 24/7

Building a PubMed search : an online clinic

2010-08-31T14:51:00.004+01:00

The National Library of Medicine has run an online clinic in building up PubMed searches. The session covers many of the most useful steps and techniques to create more effective searches. If you are starting on PubMed or if you wish to improve your search results, you can pick up some useful methods from this animated presentation.

Duration is 30 minutes but you can spool through sections you may already know.

Connect here

Paul

Health Information Resources for Ireland

2010-07-30T16:31:00.002+01:00

HIQA, the Health Information and Quality Authority, has publsihed a comprehensive catalogue of health information resources for Ireland. The catalogue includes a wide range of accessible datasets and databases holding social, economic, healthcare and clinical information produced by national and regional agencies. The catalogue also includes sources of Irish data from international agencies.

Available in PDF from HIQA here

RCSI Library Bags for sale

2010-06-02T16:23:00.002+01:00

Buy an RCSI Library bag - only €2 - from the Service Desks in the Mercer and Beaumont Hospital libraries

e-publications@RCSI, the RCSI institutional repository - competition winners!

2010-05-25T09:32:00.005+01:00

Congratulations to Frank Doyle, Department of Psychology, and Fiona O'Mahony, Department of Molecular Medicine, who each won a £50 voucher for Amazon for submitting some of their work to e-publications@RCSI, the RCSI institutional repository http://epubs.rcsi.ie.

Frank's work can be downloaded at http://epubs.rcsi.ie/psycholart/21/ and Fiona's at http://epubs.rcsi.ie/molmedart/2/

e-publications@RCSI is an open access institutional repository of research and scholarly output of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Mandated by stakeholders like SFI, HRB and HEA, repository deposit of research material has proven benefits:

broadens worldwide access to your material
increases citations for research material
preserves your work publicly
indexed on Google, Google Scholar and Scirus
profiles Irish researchers internationally

To find out more about the repository or to submit your work, contact the repository administrators at epubs@rcsi.ie or check out the website.

New email alerts in Google Scholar

2010-05-13T15:08:00.005+01:00

New in Google Scholar : email alerts of newly indexed hits that match a previous search.

Simply do a search, get your results and if you want update alerts emailed to you in future, simply click the "Envelope" icon top left.

- alerts flag newly indexed items, not necessarily newly published
- alerts work with Advanced Search
- alerts work with "Cited By" so you can be alerted to any further citations of a given item

Alerts work for proper names, keywords, phrases but they do not work for journal names so unfortunately cannot be used to get tables of contents at present.

More about this

EMBASE is back

2010-04-26T15:13:00.013+01:00

Thanks to IReL, access to EMBASE is now restored.

Over 20 million records from 7,000 + journals.
Strong coverage of drug, pharmaceutical and European content.
Indexes over 1,800 biomedical titles not offered by Medline.
Includes all Medline content- search together or seperately.

EMBASE’s drug indexing is underpinned by chemical names, trade names and laboratory/research codes that are mapped to generic names for more than 27,000 drugs and chemicals. More than twice as large as Medline’s thesaurus MeSH and including all MeSH terms, Emtree opens up access to the literature via more than 230,000 synonyms.

Connect on or off campus via the library database page here

Journal articles about EMBASE in systematic review searching:
http://www.info.embase.com/why-use-embase/whitepapers-articles

Find all RCSI authors in the combined EMBASE + Medline :
1. Go to advanced search
2. Turn off all mapping
3. Paste in this search string to retrieve authors with RCSi and Beaumont affiliations:

(royal:ad AND college:ad AND surgeons:ad AND ireland:ad) OR (rcsi:ad) OR (beaumont:ad AND dublin:ad)

Further information Paul Murphy

Fellowships and training - Cochrane Library in Ireland

2010-03-08T15:15:00.003Z

The Cochrane Collaboration produces systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and disseminates them in the Cochrane Library. The Health Research Board (HRB) co-funds free national access to the Cochrane Library.

Cochrane Fellowships

The HRB are offering fellowships to healthcare practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers to carry out their own systematic review. It provides the Fellow with protected time of up to two days per week for up to two years to conduct a review. The award covers systematic review training costs, salary-related costs and research expenses.

The deadline is 12.00 noon on 20 May 2010. Full details and guidance notes on the HRB website (www.hrb.ie).

Cochrane Library Training Courses

The aim of the courses is to build awareness and capacity in conducting systematic reviews. On offer are:

Introduction to Cochrane - this half-day course will train people with little or no previous experience to access and use the Cochrane Library
Cochrane Systematic Review Course - this intensive two-day course will cover systematic review methodologies and critical appraisal skills. Suitable for those who may be thinking of conducting a systematic review themselves.

The deadline for applications is 12.00 noon on 26 March 2010. Further details and guidance notes available on the HRB website (www.hrb.ie).

Challenging Google Scholar

2010-03-02T11:54:00.003Z

An article by Peter Jasco in the journal Online Information Review challenges the use of Google Scholar in evaluating the publishing performance and impact of journals and of researchers. Citing examples of phantom authors, unindexed names, and volatile hits, Jasco concludes that bibliometric measures based on Google Scholar may be unreliable.

Title: Metadata mega mess in Google Scholar
Author(s): Peter Jacso
Journal: Online Information Review
Year:2010 Volume:34 Issue:1 Page:175 - 191

Available direct to RCSI users: DOI: 10.1108/14684521011024191

The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - find the evidence

2010-01-21T14:39:00.007Z

From 2010, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews will be published monthly.

A systematic review identifies an intervention for a specific disease or healthcare problem and determines if it works. Evidence is located, appraised and synthesized from as many relevant scientific studies as possible. Systematic reviews adhere to a strict design in order to make them more comprehensive, thus minimizing the chance of bias and ensuring reliability.

The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews comprises over 4,000 reviews and almost 2,000 protocols (reviews in progress).

From 2008, it also includes systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy. These reviews assess the accuracy of a diagnostic test(s) for a given target condition in a specific patient/participant group or setting.

Changes to the review and protocol headers

From 2010, the header reflects the most recent status of the review, for example if there has been a new literature search conducted, or the conclusions have changed, or the review has been edited.

Click picture to enlarge.

The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews is part of the Cochrane Library. Find it at http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/

Research strengths in Ireland

2009-12-11T12:35:00.004Z

Research strengths in Ireland:a bibliometric study of the public research base

HEA Forfás Nov 2009

Forfás and the Higher Education Authority (HEA) have published two reports which profile research activity in Ireland and which measure Irish research outputs against various international markers.The bibliometric report measures performance outputs from the Irish universities and research institutions in terms of published journal papers in various disciplines. RCSI's substantial and growing research impact is noted in a number of contexts. A second report maps the extent of Irish research collaboration with institutions worldwide.

The bibliometric and collaboration reports are available for download from the HEA site at

http://www.hea.ie/files/files/file/Research/ResearchStrengthsInIreland.pdf
http://www.hea.ie/files/files/file/Research/ResearchStrengthsInIreland%20Collaboration.pdf

Paul

Renewing books online

2009-11-25T15:02:00.003Z

You can renew your own books online using your user id number (from your RCSI id/library card) and your library password. Get your password from the service desks in the Mercer or Beaumont Hospital libraries.

Go to the Library's website and choose Catalogues
Sign in to the RCSI Library catalogue using your user id number and password
Click on My Library Account to display your record
Click on the link for Loans
Click on Renew All to renew your loans
Or renew loans individually by clicking on the item number and then the Renew button

Note - you may not renew an item if:

there is a hold on it
you have outstanding fines
you have already renewed it six times

Email us at library@rcsi.ie or phone us at 402 2407 (Mercer) or 809 2531 (Beaumont) if you have questions.

Wellbeing Book Collection

2009-11-10T11:26:00.028Z

We have a new collection of books aimed at helping you cope with the stresses of student life covering topics like stress, addiction, anxiety, men's health, pregnancy and miscarriage, coping with panic attacks and relaxation techniques.

Search for "wellbeing" in the library catalogue for a full list of the titles available or ask a member of staff for more details.

Find it@RCSI Library

2009-11-03T12:43:00.006Z

Ejournal portal to link through to the full-text of articles

Databases page to find articles on a topic

Ebooks page for the full text of a large range of electronic textbooks and digests

Library guide for opening hours and staff contacts

New look PubMed

2009-10-28T14:18:00.004Z

From today, PubMed has changed to a new format. All the features of PubMed are still there…….but in a different place.

From the home page, you still have the search box and you can also link to:
MeSH Database
Clinical Queries (for evidence-based filters)
Lots of Help – see Using PubMed

The Limits, History and Details features can now be found in Advanced Search. Here you will also find links to other resources such as the MeSH database or Clinical Queries.

Why not take this opportunity to catch up with PubMed features and take the tutorials? See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html

The web address (http://www.pubmed.gov/) remains the same, so any bookmarks you have set up won’t be affected. Any saved searches or alerts (My NCBI) won’t be affected by the changes.

Further details available from the NLM (producers of PubMed) at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html and
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_now_redesign.html .

iPhone the Body Electric - human anatomy apps for iPhone

2009-10-16T10:53:00.005+01:00

University of Utah researchers have created 3 new iPhone apps to "help scientists, students, doctors and patients study the human body, evaluate medical problems and analyze other three-dimensional images". Find out more about these apps and where to get them on their news centre website - see iPhone the Body Electric
Jenny

RCSI Library - get information via email on your book hold requests, overdues, etc.

2009-10-13T11:41:00.003+01:00

The Library can communicate with all students via email about book hold requests, book overdues, etc. However we can only email you if we have a current and correct email address for you. The Library receives your address details from the college's student database, so if you need to update your email (or other contact) details:

Undergraduate students - send an update of your term-time email address details to Student Services by filling in the Student Change of Address Form on Moodle (please fill in your name, student number and email address only).
Postgraduate students - Please ask your Course Coordinator to update your details.

Please make sure in particular that there is a current email address in your term-time address.

Note: To check what email address we currently have for you, go to http://library.rcsi.ie/ and click on "Sign in". Sign in using your ID number and your Library account password (available from the Library Service Desk). Click on "My Library Account". Scroll down the page to the address information section and you can see the email address that the Library has for you. Click "End session" to log off.

Changes to how electronic journal articles are indexed

2009-08-31T10:03:00.006+01:00

PubMed has announced that MEDLINE records would in many cases now refer to the online, electronic versions of journals rather than the print version. This reflects the fact that many publishers now deem the ejournal as the version of record with complete content for each issue. More about PubMed practice here

In parallel with this development, publishers such as BMJ have dropped traditional date - volume - part - page pagination in references and replaced it with a new method where the electronic article is given a unique number instead of page numbers.

BMJ references in in PubMed now look like this:

Should antihistamines be used to treat anaphylaxis?
Andreae DA, Andreae MH.
BMJ. 2009 Jul 10;339:b2489. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b2489.

The date (Jul 10) and volume (339) format remains the same but the article reference is now to " b2489 " a number unique to this article in this issue. Also referenced is the doi or digital object identifier, a unique string which enables a digital object to be searched and found on the internet.

Paul

Web of Science

2009-08-12T16:19:00.010+01:00

Web of Science
Citation Indexes and Journal Citation Reports

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary journal index comprising Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. It includes 10,000 + journals and there are more journals indexed and more disciplines covered than Medline, especially in:

Biomedicine
Biotechnology
Chemistry
Social sciences
Health services
Healthcare management
Pharmacology

More content than Medline with meeting abstracts and conference papers and these unique search features:

Find all citations to a known paper or author
Calculate citations for an author or a paper
Show impact measures for an author, paper or institution
Find an author’s h-Index

You can track from any one research article or any one author all those other researchers who have subsequently cited that work in other papers. Thus networks and clusters of research activity can be traced through following citations. The citation databases provide the basis for the calculation of the impact factors for biomedical journals worldwide. Also included is Journal Citation Reports, which gives the Impact Factors for all Web of Science journals in science and the social sciences.

Full download (including EndNote), personalized alert features, help and tutorials. Connect from the library’s web page at http://www.rcsi.ie/library/databases

Funded for RCSI by SFI and delivered via IReL

Paul

2009-07-30T08:50:00.010+01:00

WHO
Information resources at the World Health Organization http://www.who.int/en/

Health Topics
An A-Z of hundreds of healthcare topics with each topic containing

Fact Sheets
Technical Information
Statistics - country, regional, global
Q & A

Country Profiles

Facts & figures
Healthcare systems
Mortality

Data and statistics

Diseases
Risk factors
Regional and global atlases
Statistical information systems

Publications

Database of WHO’s global libraries, reports & journals
International health regulation, reports, disease classification

Paul

Irish tutorial online: information skills for PhDs

2009-07-10T12:07:00.003+01:00

The Highter Education Authority has funded an online information skills tutorial which is aimed at Irish PhD students. Taking cancer research as an example, the tutorial features segments on resources, search techniques, literature reviews and records management. The tutorial was developed jointly by UCC, TCD and NUIG.

View it here http://sifinfolit.nuigalway.ie/

Paul

Lenus, the Irish Health Repository

2009-06-23T15:00:00.006+01:00

LENUS is an online repository of health-related reports, research and official publications from 1960 compiled by the HSE Regional Library & Information Service in Dublin. LENUS includes policy documents, official publications, clinical research, theses and statistics. Authors can also submit their original research to the repository. LENUS includes documents from the former Irish Health Boards, the Health Service Executive and Department of Health and Children. It is an important resource for health professionals, policy makers, academics, librarians, students and the general public.

Paul

NCBI Biosystems Database

2009-06-23T12:16:00.006+01:00

The NCBI Biosystems database has now gone public. The NCBI BioSystems Database currently contains biological pathways from two source databases, KEGG and the EcoCyc subset of BioCyc. It uses the same search interface as other NCBI databases as pubmed and Entrez Gene.

Use the database to list genes, proteins, and small molecules that are involved in a biological pathway. More

Find the pathways in which a given gene or protein is involved. More
Find the pathways in which a specific small molecule is involved. More
Retrieve 3D structures for proteins involved in a biosystem. More

Paul

Paying open access publication charges - a report

2009-04-29T09:48:00.012+01:00

The Research Information Network have published the following report on open access publication charges:

"Paying for open access publication charges. Guidance for higher education and research institutions, publishers and authors. A report by Universities UK and the Research Information Network"

Publication charges are the fees levied by some journals (such as BioMed Central) to publish articles and make them available free of charge to the reader. This report provides advice and guidance on the arrangements for paying open access publication fees and is aimed at research institutions, research funders, publishers and authors.

The report is available in the Mercer and Beaumont Hospital libraries. Alternatively you can view the full report by clicking on the link below
http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/Paying_open_access_charges_guide_March_2009.pdf

RCSI repository for research and scholarly output - e-publications@RCSI

2009-04-07T16:16:00.008+01:00

The Library has set up a repository for RCSI research and scholarly output called http://epubs.rcsi.ie/

What is e-publications@RCSI?
e-publications@RCSI (http://epubs.rcsi.ie/) is an open access repository of the research and scholarly output of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. The service is in development and is maintained and managed by RCSI Library.

Whose research is in it?
Material can be deposited by RCSI staff and students.

Where is it?
You can find it at http://epubs.rcsi.ie/ or link to it from the RCSI Library web pages.

How do I deposit my research?
Contact the repository administrators at epubs@rcsi.ie. We will contact you with further information on how to submit.

What can it do for me?

Help make your academic work freely available on the internet
Increase worldwide access to your work (in just 4 weeks people have downloaded RCSI research from 16 different countries)
Provide a central archive of your work
Many Irish funding bodies, including SFI, the HEA, the HRB and IRCSET, require researchers to submit published work funded by them to an open access repository

What do I need to do?
Keep pre- and post-prints of all your publications!
If possible we will use the publisher version of your publications. However, many publishers do not allow use of their final version. They usually allow use of pre-prints (this is the version of the paper pre-refereeing/pre-peer review) and/or post-prints (this is the final draft post-refereeing/post-peer review).

Find it@RCSI Library

2009-03-03T11:52:00.009Z

1. I have found the abstract (summary) of a really good article and I have the full reference (volume and page numbers) – where do I go to find the full text?

2. I have to find information on the overuse of medication, which database should I use to find articles on the topic?

3. Google gives me loads of irrelevant sites – biased, commercial – is there an alternative?

Looking for answers to these or similar questions?

Ask us at the Service Desks in the Mercer and Beaumont Hospital Libraries

Email us at library@rcsi.ie

Explore the Library’s website :

Ejournal portal to link through to the full-text of articles

Databases page to find articles on a topic

Ebooks page for the full text of a large range of electronic textbooks and digests

Library guide for opening hours and staff contacts

Searching PubMed & using subject headings

2009-02-24T16:15:00.004Z

The previous posting dealt with checking how PubMed has interpreted the words you typed. A typical “translation” includes searching for those words (separately and as phrases) as well as a subject heading search.

But what are subject headings?

· Subject headings are added by indexers to the record when it is added to the database. The record describes the article: author, title, journal details, abstract and subject headings. The indexers read the article, identify the principal topics and add the standard subject headings to the record.

· They describe articles in a standardised way – eg, pressure sores, pressure ulcers, bed sores, bed ulcers are all described as decubitus ulcers

· Therefore a subject heading search for decubitus ulcers will pick up all the variations in the way the authors describe pressure sores, bed sores etc

· The words you type are translated into the appropriate subject heading. If you are unhappy with the subject heading, try a new search but describe the it in a different way

· PubMed explodes the subject heading: it searches for articles with the selected heading as well as articles with more specific headings on the same subject

· Click on the heading and you will see the tree (categories), which displays the narrower headings (more specific). For example, exploding Bereavement includes Grief in your search

· Use the MeSH Database in PubMed to carry out a subject heading search alone (ie excluding the word searches)

Use subject headings to:
· make your search more relevant – a subject heading will only be added if it is an important topic
· pick up the variations in describing the topic – the subject headings are standard
· gather narrower, related subjects into your search – when the subject heading is exploded

Be careful:
· In PubMed, the most recent articles don’t yet have subject headings, so you need to do word searches as well (default search)
· While subject headings are standardised, there can be differences in interpretation. For example, the topic “do not resuscitate” can be found with subject headings of “Resuscitation Orders”, “Refusal to Treat” and “ Withdrawal of Treatment”

More information on subject headings from the PubMed tutorial and the Information Seeking & Library Skills section on Moodle.

Do you know what PubMed is doing for you?

2009-02-17T15:47:00.007Z

PubMed is an intuitive and sophisticated database. When you type in your keywords, it translates them into a complex search. You need to be sure that the system is interpreting them appropriately.

After each search, click on the DETAILS tab to find out.

You type deep vein thrombosis and PubMed translates it into the following searches:

Venous Thrombosis (MeSH – subject heading search)
OR
venous and thrombosis (searches for the words, but not necessarily together or in that order)
OR
“venous thrombosis” (searches for the phrase)
OR
deep and vein and thrombosis (searches for the words, but not necessarily together or in that order)
OR
“deep vein thrombosis” (search for the phrase)

Checking Details after each search allows you to keep track of the searches PubMed carries out on your behalf.

More information from PubMed or see the Information & Library Skills section on Moodle for lots of support material on searching PubMed.

New online pharmacopeias

2009-02-10T16:31:00.016Z

The RCSI Library has new subscriptions to two online pharmacopeias

Martindale: The Complete Drug Reference is an extensive and well-referenced encyclopedia of facts about drugs and medicines aimed at researchers, medical professionals, pharmacists, and clinical education instructors.

Martindale contains:
Over 6,300 drug monographs
149,000 preparations
40,700 references
14,700 manufacturers
Synopses of treatments for more than 660 diseases
Enables identification of medicines, the local equivalent and the manufacturer
Includes herbals, diagnostic agents, radiopharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical excipients, toxins, and poisons as well as drugs and medicines
Based on published information and extensively referenced

Martindale is available on or off campus with your RCSI network username and password.

The British National Formulary (BNF) provides up-to-date information on prescribing, dispensing and administering medicines. It details medicines prescribed in the UK with special reference to their uses, cautions, contra-indications, side-effects, dosage and relative costs.

The BNF is published jointly by the BMJ Group and RPS Publishing and is updated every six months. It is intended for use by prescribers, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.

BNF is available on or off campus with your RCSI network username and password.

New evidence-based resource

2009-01-26T10:17:00.031Z

RCSI Library brings you Clinical Evidence to help you make informed decisions about common clinical conditions

Clinical Evidence is an important evidence based medicine resource published by the BMJ. It gathers the available evidence about common clinical conditions and provides a concise account of the current state of knowledge, ignorance, and uncertainty about the prevention and treatment of each condition. It describes the best available evidence from systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies where appropriate and if there is no good evidence it says so.

Clinical Evidence aims to help people make informed decisions about which treatments to use. It can also show where more research is needed and highlight gaps in the evidence, where there are currently no good randomised controlled trials or no randomised controlled trials that look at groups of people or at important patient outcomes. For clinicians and patients it highlights treatments that work, treatments that may currently be underused and treatments that do not work or for which the harms outweigh the benefits.

Access to Clinical Evidence is available on or off campus with your network username and password.

Link to it from the RCSI library web page or click here
Connect to Clinical Evidence

Environmental health and toxicology resources

2009-01-05T09:52:00.005Z

TOXNET is the US National Library of Medicine's gateway for Environmental Health and Toxicology information. TOXNET includes the Hazardous Substances Data Bank (a database of potentially hazardous chemicals), TOXLINE (references to the world's toxicology literature), and ChemIDplus (chemical dictionary and structure database). Connect to TOXNET here

The SIS portal ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND TOXICOLOGY offers a set of database and information resources about NLM's environmental, chemical and drug information services, including toxicology related tutorials and fact sheets. Connect here

Paul

Connecting to ejournals from off-campus

2008-12-05T15:28:00.002Z

1. You know the article details – ie author, title, journal, volume, page numbers
You must link to the ejournal from the Ejournal Portal on the Library’s website. Go to http://www.rcsi.ie/library, choose Ejournals, then Ejournal Portal. You can use the alphabetical list to link to the journal, or you can search for the journal title

2. You are searching the Ovid (Medline, PsycInfo, EBMR) or EBSCO (CINAHL, Medline) databases
Click on the Fulltext@RCSI? button and follow the article link to the full-text.

3. You are searching PubMed
Use PubMed to identify your articles and then go to the Ejournal Portal on the Library’s website (http://www.rcsi.ie/library, choose Ejournals, then Ejournal Portal) to link to the full text. Linking directly to the publishers’ websites from PubMed won’t allow you access to our ejournal subscriptions.

Grainne

Focus on DynaMed

2008-11-13T15:02:00.004Z

Focus on DynaMed

DynaMed is a clinical reference tool and digest created by physicians for use primarily at the 'point-of-care'. With summaries for nearly 2,000 topics, DynaMed is an evidence-based knowledge base designed to answer most clinical questions. DynaMed is updated daily and monitors the content of over 500 medical journals and systematic reviews.

Try it

New library resources

2008-10-15T08:58:00.004+01:00

Faculty of 1000 Medicine and Faculty of 1000 Biology are two major new online services designed to help medics keep abreast of the most important new research in medicine and biology.

Run by a teams of over 2000 of the world's leading researchers and clinicians, Faculty of 1000 Medicine and Biology provide a consensus view of important articles and trends across medicine and the biological sciences. Faculty Members select the most significant articles and contribute short evaluations, providing a guide to key articles in your field, together with an expert's interpretation of what each article adds to our clinical knowledge.

Key features

Continuously updated selections of key articles across medicine and biology

Authoritative, timely and concise evaluations by leading clinicians and researchers.

Systematic organisation of only the most important medical literature.

Articles highlighted on the basis of their scientific merit and clinical relevance, rather than the reputation of the journal in which they appear.

Connect to the Faculty of 1000 Medicine

Connect to the Faculty of 1000 Biology

Faculty of 1000 is funded by the Science Foundation Ireland and access is via IReL

Julia

Do we have the right email address for you?

2008-10-03T10:43:00.005+01:00

The Library can communicate with all Library users via email about book hold requests, book overdues, etc. However we can only email you if we have a current and correct email address for you.

Students
The Library receives student address details from the college's student database, so if you need to update your email (or other contact) details:

Undergraduate students - you can send an update of your term time address/email details to Student Services by filling in the Student Change of Address Form on Moodle. You can also go to the Exams Office or Student Services and ask to update your term-time details. The Fees Office can amend your permanent/home address details.
Postgraduate students - should go to their Course Coordinator to advise of change of address/updated details.

Staff/Alumni/Surgical Training students
The Library can update email addresses for staff, alumni, associate members and for students from Surgical Training - email us(library@rcsi.ie) or call to the Service Desks to advise us of your address/email updates.

Students - please make sure in particular that there is a current email address in your term-time address.

Note: To check what email address we currently have for you, go to http://library.rcsi.ie/ and click on "Sign in". Sign in using your ID number and your Library account password (available from the Library Service Desk). Click on "My Library Account". Scroll down the page to the address information section and you can see the email address that the Library has for you. Click "End session" to log off.

Journals: Table of Contents and email alerts

2008-09-25T09:40:00.004+01:00

Most of us know the important journals likely to publish valuable research. Virtually all these journals will provide table of contents as direct email alerts to you.

Create your own account or register at the journal website to activate these personalised options. Alerts are added to your personal profile and are usually described as Alert me about new Journal Issues or Set e-mail alert

For large journal collections such as ScienceDirect and Nature and databases such as MEDLINE, you can create multiple alerts and search profiles and these services will push updates to you by email.

More on Moodle Information Seeking and Library Skills : Journals

Paul

EMBASE new to RCSI

2008-09-12T10:21:00.014+01:00

Embase A major database new to RCSI : 18 million records in life and biomedical sciences, clinical medicine and pharmacology. Embase complements MEDLINE with significant coverage of drug related sources. Offers combined Embase and MEDLINE single search.

Drug Research, Pharmacology, Pharmaceutics, Pharmacy, Drug Side Effects and Interactions, Toxicology, Human Medicine (Clinical and Experimental), Basic Biological Sciences, Biotechnology, Biomedical, Medical Devices, Engineering and Instrumentation, Health Policy and Management, Pharmacoeconomics, Public and Occupational Health, Environmental Health, Pollution Control, Substance Dependence and Abuse, Psychiatry, Forensic Science.

Connect via library database page.

Paul

RCSI Library catalogue update

2008-09-05T14:59:00.003+01:00

It is now possible to search the RCSI Library catalogue separately by each of our recent or historical collections. The default search in the catalogue (RCSI Library Main Catalogue) will search for items available on our general shelves, including textbooks, reference material, journals etc.
If you are interested in searching for historical books and other items that we have here at RCSI, click on "Other RCSI Library Catalogues" in the top menu of the catalogue and choose "RCSI Library historical collections catalogue". Our historical material is kept in a separate store. Please enquire at the Mercer Library Service Desk (email: library@rcsi.ie) if you would like to study any of this material.
You can still search both collections together by choosing "RCSI Library complete catalogue (main + historical collections)".
Jenny

New Advanced Search on PubMed

2008-08-13T15:40:00.008+01:00

In the new search interface you will find a search box on the top and new sections beneath it, which you probably already are familiar with:

> PubMed Search History - It displays your five last searches
> Search by Author, Journal, Publication Date, and more. These field searching screens allow you to choose specific fields to search in (including MeSH or subheadings) and to combine these fields (AND, OR). Author and Journal fields have the auto-complete feature for entering terms; for other fields you can use the helpful index feature
> Limit by Topics, Languages, and Journal Groups

Try it

Paul

Science Foundation Ireland are developing an Open Access policy

2008-08-08T09:33:00.004+01:00

The Open Repository movement is taking off in research centres worldwide and SFI are developing a policy to encourage SFI funded researchers to deposit their publications in Open Access Repositories. More from SFI here.

The National Institutes of Health Policy on Public Access to publically funded research may be viewed here.

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

2008-07-31T12:25:00.008+01:00

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The study carried out by the CIBER team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

Paul

PubMed - set up a MyNCBI account to organise your searches

2008-07-18T10:00:00.005+01:00

Set up a personal account on PubMed. This will allow you to:

Save searches
Have results of regularly updated searches emailed to you
Save items in personal collections

What to do:

Go to MyNCBI and register for a new account
When you are happy with your search strategy, save the search and request email updates
Alternatively, when browsing through your search results, select items of interest by ticking the box beside the item number and choose Collections from the Send To menu
You can add to one collections of items or set up several collections

More information from PubMed Help

Grainne

Greetings!

2008-07-16T10:38:00.003+01:00

Welcome to the RCSI Library blog! We aim to post information about new developments from the Library and to regularly update you on how to get the best use of healthcare resources, for example how to use PubMed more effectively, how to set up ejournal alerts, introduction to good healthcare websites and lots more. We'll also post updates on opening hours, events and other initiatives. We would like your feedback to help us improve the blog - let us know at library@rcsi.ie.
RCSI Library staff