Levy Library

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Reminder: Levy Library doesn’t just license thousands of research journals. We also support Mount Sinai faculty and administrators by licensing the news sources that you need to stay on top of changes in your field, such as the widely read Chronicle of Higher Education.

Tech Tip: If you are on-campus, you may have found that you can simply go to The Chronicle web site and get access to all the current premium content; The Chronicle will probably recognize you as being from Mount Sinai. But if you are not recognized, or if you are trying to access The Chronicle from off-campus, you will need go to our E-Journals database (linked from the Levy Library homepage). 

Once you are in E-Journals, search for The Chronicle by title. You’ll see it’s available on several platforms.  For the most current, full-featured version, click the link to Chronicle of Higher Education.  If you are off-campus, you will be asked to authenticate with your Mount Sinai email user name and password (your Active Directory credentials). 

If you are looking for older issues, you may find it easier to browse The Chronicle through the ProQuest platform. The Chronicle web site only lists the last 25 issues—older content can be found by searching. But ProQuest has every issue (and full-text) going back to 1988.
Oh—and we have current issues of The Chronicle in print in the Levy Library. Look for them in our Leisure Reading collection.

I Found it in the Archives

    There have been quite a few news stories this past week about how an historian has brought to light an instance of American public health researchers experimenting on Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients without their consent.  (See, for instance, The New York Times, 10/1/10; link below)   The scientists infected nearly 700 people with syphilis to test how well penicillin worked against the disease and if it could be used to prevent the disease.

    What does this have to do with archives?  The only reason this story is known is because the historian who uncovered this, Susan M. Reverby, was doing research on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh.  In an effort to be thorough, Reverby also consulted the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who was also involved at Tuskegee.  It was there that she found the information about this unknown experiment, which lasted from 1946-48, with very little result.  If the Cutler papers had not been preserved and made available by the archives, there is little reason to think we would have ever known about this awful lapse in medical ethics.

    The month of October is Archives Month in this country.  This year's theme of "I found it in the Archives" takes on added meaning when you consider this story.

 

Links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=health

http://www.hnn.us/articles/132082.html for an interview with Dr. Reverby

UpToDate

UpToDate has recently released version 17.3, which now includes topic reviews in Adult and Pediatric Emergency Medicine. To quickly review important medical findings since the last release, select "What's New", found on the top left of the search screen. From there you can choose "Practice Changing UpDates" or updates by speciality.

Looking for information about swine flu?

Most of the articles I’ve read in the past couple of days mention that experts and policy-makers at places like the CDC and the WHO don’t have nearly as much information as they would like, but the information they do have they are making available in a variety of ways. The CDC and WHO websites are always good sources of information, and they have both set up specific sites to communicate with the public about these swine flu outbreaks.

Because the outbreak is so recent and information is still emerging, newspaper articles can be a good place to look. Of course there are newspaper websites like nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com, but for a broader look try our LexisNexis database – a search for “swine flu” retrieves articles from New York, Toronto, Tokyo, London and more. For a more academic look, try the news portions of journals like Science and Nature.

If you’re searching PubMed for articles, be aware that there isn’t a MeSH heading for swine flu exactly, and a search of the term “swine flu” won’t map specifically to articles about this particular strain. You can use the MeSH heading “Influenza A Virus, H1N1 Subtype”, but be aware that this will retrieve articles about both human and swine H1N1 strains, and remember that very recent articles won’t necessarily have had MeSH headings assigned to them yet.

There is also a lot of information being made available by various public health agencies and media outlets. As always, if you need any assistance finding information, please ask us!

New: AAP Grand Rounds

Pediatrics types will be interested in our new online resource, AAP Grand Rounds. From the American Association of Pediatrics, AAP Grand Rounds pulls relevant, methodologically sound pediatrics articles from 75 journals. Physicians then summarize and comment on the articles to help you stay abreast of the latest developments in the field. The current issue covers a wide range of topics ranging from maternal influenza vaccination to MRSA in bath water to pediatric injuries from golfballs and inflatable backyard bouncers. Past issues are of course fully searchable. We think of this resource as a pediatrics version of ACP Journal Club, which is also definitely worth a look if you're not familiar with it yet.

Journal Watch

The Library now provides access to several titles from the popular current awareness resource, Journal Watch (from the publishers of New England Journal of Medicine).  You may now access the following Journal Watch titles: General Medicine, Neurology, Cardiology, Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Gastroenterology, and Infectious Diseases by going to the library's e-journals page.  A Journal Watch username and password is required for access and will be listed on a page before you get to the journal.  Please note: You will not be able to link from any Journal Watch email alerts you may receive to the library's licensed full-text, unless you take note of the library's username and password.   

Save Your PubMed Searches Using MY NCBI

A common question at the reference desk is: "How do I save my PubMed search?"  PubMed's My NCBI feature makes it very easy to save and rerun your searches at a later date.  Simply click the “Save Search” link next to the ‘Go’ button. PubMed will prompt you to log in to your My NCBI account (or create a new account) and save your search. At a later date you can log in to see what is new for your saved search. My NCBI also allows you to set up automatic emails, create RSS feeds, and store regularly used filters.

My Faculty of 1000

Faculty of 1000 Medicine and Faculty of 1000 Biology, our popular current awareness resources, are now allowing you to create a personalized home page tailored to your interests.  You can also store searches -- for example: all articles rated as "exceptional" in your subject area -- and receive email updates of newly evaluated articles.  Faculty of 1000 uses the recommendations of over 2,500 leading researchers to select the most important journal articles and rate them as Exceptional, Must Read or Recommended.  To sign up for a My Faculty of 1000 account, access Faculty of 1000 from the library's databases page under the category Current Awareness.  Then click on My F1000 from the Faculty of 1000 homepage.