BioMedLib.com (found, confusingly at http://bmlsearch.com/)is a newer offering that Mir Said Siadaty made me aware of in September and that I’ve only just recently started to play with. These are, in my opinion, the major selling points of the tool:

Use BioMedLib to solve common MEDLINE® search issues
• Does it take a long time to screen your search results in order to locate relevant articles?
• Are you sure you have found all the relevant publications for your query?
• Do you need to monitor authors who are publishing on your topic?
• Do you wish your search engine could sort the results by their relevance and publication date?
• Do you want to have a PDF copy of the search results for your records?
• Are you tired of using special query syntax language for more relevant results?

The BioMedLib™ search engine provides easy solutions to all of the above, and more. BioMedLib is free of charge and open access. Seeking to help themselves and others to overcome their frustrations with the search process, a group of biomedical scientists used extensive research and their years of experience to build BioMedLib.

In short, these are the things I liked about ReleMed.

The customization of the interface through the “Theme” features is sort of neat, but not really my cup of tea. The “Who is Publishing in My Domain?” feature doesn’t do anything I’d want to pay a premium for because these things aren’t difficult to do with free tools.

And I’m not thrilled with the search results for simple searches. If I enter “Melissa Rethlefsen” into the PubMed search field (she has a unique name, so Melissa’s name is a great test), I get good results: items where she’s an author or co-author- 12 hits.

BioMedLib doesn’t return ANY results with the same search terms, but if you search for “Rethlefsen M,” it returns 17 hits….but those 5 extra hits are articles where Melissa is NOT an author.

So…meh.

Thoughts?

[Other posts on 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tools]

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Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators

Certain librarianish tendencies seem to have stuck for good, despite the fact that I don’t work in a library any more.

Wanting to structure data about publishing/presenting by members of my department’s faculty, I quickly grew rustrated with RefWorks because it doesn’t do NLM citations properly and it doesn’t even have a Ref Type for Presentations. (My view, by the way, is that it is false advertising for RefWorks to claim that it supports NLM. It doesn’t. Not correctly and not thoroughly.)

So I started again looking at Zotero, which I dreaded. The last time I tried it, I found it frustrating and quickly gave up.

This time, though, I had a secret weapon: Jason Puckett. Jason is a friend and I knew he was a sharp and terribly nice guy with great taste- but I had no idea how good his book was.

Jason’s book, Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators is outstanding. I’m a fussy critic of writing, but I loved Jason’s. The structure of the book is simple, the writing is clear and friendly. This book got me up to speed on Zotero much faster than if I’d just relied on the documentation and my own experimentation.

Thanks to this quick start, I discovered that Zotero is far more powerful than RefWorks and accomplishes much more in far less time.

If you ever were curious about Zotero, get the book and start playing with it. If you’re a RefWorks user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more powerful Zotero is while still being pretty darn easy to use.

ALA Folks: You can buy a DRM-Free version here.

Medical Libraryfolk: I’m curious. What are your favorite tools for managing bibliographic data? Really, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I want to manage the data of all publishing/presentation done by members of our faculty and I’d welcome suggestions of what tools to try.

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A few months ago, I took a job as the geek (technologist-generalist?) for the Department of Emergency Medicine at SUNY Upstate. I love the job. Love it. The people are great and the work is both challenging and interesting.

While I have really enjoyed shifting more to the mechanics of health information than the content, I’ve found certain librarianish habits and interests haven’t faded.

For instance, TheNNT.com fascinates me.

http://www.thennt.com/

“There is a way of understanding how much modern medicine has to offer individual patients. It is a simple statistical concept called the “Number-Needed-to-Treat”, or for short the ‘NNT’. The NNT offers a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. The concept is statistical, but intuitive, for we know that not everyone is helped by a medicine or intervention — some benefit, some are harmed, and some are unaffected. The NNT tells us how many of each.”

Here’s a great example: Anticoagulation for Venous Thromboembolism

Or check out Mediterranean Diet for Secondary Prevention After Heart Attack.

Is it just me, or is this site crazy awesome? I’ve encountered a handful of physicians who like the site a lot, but I’ve heared next to nothing from medical librarians. Any thoughts?

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Have you checked out our book yet?

[Thanks, Emily!]

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
By James Gleick

Okay, I admit I’m already reading this one- and LOVING it.  Gleick (who also wrote a great biography of Richard Feynman), writes in a fascinating, engaging way about the history of information and of information technology.  This book wonderfully illuminates how we got where we are and provides hints at where we might be going.

I would like a stack of 20 copies, please, so I can give one to each of my favorite 20 technology-resistant librarians.

Check out these reviews.

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An Introduction to Research for Health Librarians
By Barbara Sen

This looks like one I’d love to read- and it is being released in May.

“This step-by-step guide provides encouragement, support, and direction for health librarians who may be new to research and evaluation or lacking in confidence or expertise. With a focus on practice-based research, evaluation, and small projects, it guides the reader through the research process, from starting to think about the research question, through to the completion of the research and dissemination of the results. It is designed to encourage quality research from library professionals and encourage them to add to the evidence base in this sector. This timely collection considers methods and approaches that are suitable in a health library context, making it a useful tool for health library professionals and students alike.”

________________________________

Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach it
By Sharon E. Straus MD, Paul Glasziou MRCGP FRACGP PhD, W. Scott Richardson MD, R. Brian Haynes MD

This one was released in December, but I haven’t gotten to it yet- and I’ve been instructed quite sternly to read everything Sharon Strauss writes.

“Evidence Based Medicine provides a clear explanation of the central questions: how to ask answerable clinical questions; how to translate them into effective searches for the best evidence; how to critically appraise that evidence for its validity and importance; and how to integrate it with patients’ values and preferences.”

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Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide
By Jessamyn C. West

Rachel Walden taught me what a “librarian crush” is, and I have had a librarian crush on Jessamyn since I saw these signs.

Teaching novice computer users, including seniors and individuals with disabilities such as low vision or motor skills, how to do what they want and need to do online is a formidable challenge for library staff. Part inspirational, part practical Without a/the Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide is a summary of techniques, approaches, and skills that will help librarians meet this challenge.

Jessamyn C. West’s experience as a librarian is deeply immersed in technology culture, yet living in rural America makes her uniquely qualified to write this book. Taking a big-picture approach to the subject, she demystifies and simplifies tech training for the busy librarian, providing an easy-to-use handbook full of techniques that can be used with all of a library’s many populations. As an added bonus, she also examines the players in the library technology arena to offer firsthand reports on what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next.

________________________________

The Atlas of New Librarianship

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.

[More here]

________________________________

What new books are you reading or looking forward to?

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“Are you using mind mapping tools such as MindManager, FreeMind or XMind? And reference management tools such as JabRef, Endnote, or Zotero? And do you sometimes even create bookmark in PDFs? Then you should have a look at SciPlore MindMapping.”

My need for PDF management tools is really pretty specific and infrequent. What about you academic folks? Is this something you could use?

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My last visit was for an annual checkup a few weeks ago and we were talking about point-of-care tools and integration with his EMR.  It turns out that their EMR has no useful functionality to help find or produce patient education handouts he can quickly sent to a printer

I told him it would not be difficult to make a tool that would enable him to find authoritative handouts quickly and easily from the paid resources his practice has available, and he expressed interest in that idea.

He hasn’t followed up, but I found the idea interesting, so I started thinking about what sort of tool could be built for this purpose that could be integrated into any EMR using only patient handouts that are available at no cost on the Web.

With that in mind, I came up with a Google Custom Search Engine for use by providers at our hospital, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used by any institution or practice.

The idea behind this is that any search result is not only authoritative, but that it is within a click of a “print” button.

There are built-in refinements for large print, pediatrics, Spanish language, Seniors, and low literacy.

Please give it a try here.

Internists and medical libraryfolk: I’d be grateful for your feedback!

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Again, I laughed.

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http://www.ama.com.au/socialmedia

The Australian Medical Association Council of Doctors-in-Training (AMACDT), the New Zealand Medical Association Doctors-in-Training Council (NZMADITC), the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association (NZMSA), and the Australian Medical Students’ Association (AMSA) are committed to upholding the principles of medical professionalism. As such, we have created some practical guidelines to assist doctors and medical students to continue to enjoy the online world, while maintaining professional standards.

Download PDF

Not a bad start. Not sufficient for the purposes of most, but not a bad start. Hope others will build on this.

UPDATE:
Ratcatcher’s comment below reminds me that I should also link to a similar attempt by the American Medical Association. I agree with Ratcatcher on the relative merits of these two efforts.

[via Ratcatcher]

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http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/services/reference/study

We are looking for volunteers to participate in a study to identify trends in conducting literature searches to support systematic reviews. Results will help systematic reviewers and information professionals to better plan resources to search and allow a more accurate estimation of time and effort required for the literature search portion of a systematic review. We hope to disseminate results of this study by presentation at a meeting and/or publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The study is a survey designed to prospectively collect data and will include questions regarding participants’ background, systematic review topic, and specifics on search strategies such as names of resources utilized and time spent searching. The information will be collected at two different time points over the course of several months.

The maximum time required to complete the survey may be 45 minutes. However, most of the information we are collecting is routinely documented during the process of conducting a systematic review. Specific details on the systematic review projects will be kept confidential and survey results will be kept in safe storage. There are no foreseeable risks associated with this project. Your participation is voluntary, and you may withdraw from this project at any time.

Prerequisites: To participate in the study you must currently be involved in a systematic review, or plan to in the near future. However, searching should not have taken place prior to enrollment.

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to Ahlam Saleh at saleha@pitt.edu. Questions regarding this study should be directed to either Ahlam Saleh or Melissa Ratajeski:

Ahlam Saleh, MD, MLS
Reference Librarian
University of Pittsburgh, Health Sciences Library System
saleha@pitt.edu
412-648-2166

Melissa Ratajeski, MLIS, RLAT
Reference Librarian
University of Pittsburgh, Health Sciences Library System
mar@pitt.edu
412-648-1971

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