Research strengths in Ireland

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

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

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

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 look PubMed

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, technical websites

Searching PubMed & using subject headings

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?

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

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

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

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