Health Information Resources for Ireland

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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