Levy Library

E-Journals linking interruptions Saturday, March 24th

Due to vendor software upgrades, the E-Journals page and the Yellow Button link from PubMed to full text will be unavailable from 8-9 PM on Saturday, March 24th.  Wiley Online may also experience intermittent access problems from 6 AM to 10 AM on the same day.  We apologize for any inconvenience but anticipate a higher level of service on the other side of the upgrades. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at Ask-A-Librarian.

PubMed Troubles and Alternate Access

At the moment on-campus access to PubMed and other NCBI resources is down. We're investigating what's happening and hopefully access will be back soon. In the meantime, if you need to get some articles from PubMed, you can try one of our other interfaces to MEDLINE (i.e., most of the content of PubMed):

Through the Web of Science interface: this interface lets you search MEDLINE like you would search Web of Science (it even lets you search both at once!). It works really well for importing citations into EndNote, and for citations that are in both MEDLINE and Web of Science, you can see how many times they have been cited, and by whom.

Through the OvidSP interface: this interface works like the interface we use for PsycINFO, and is popular at many other institutions.

Both of these interfaces use different search algorithms than PubMed, so the exact same search may get different results across the three interfaces. At the Levy Library we love PubMed for its Automatic Term Mapping feature, but these others have perks as well, especially when PubMed is down!

Planned internet, email outage tonight

Might be a good idea to schedule a walk in the park tonight from 8-10 pm, because there is network maintenance scheduled and several systems will be unavailable. You won't be able to access WebEd, online resources from the Library or, if you are on the Exchange system, your email. In fact, depending where you are, you may not be able to access the internet at all: there will be no internet access in the Library, on floors 5, 10-14 and 16-26 of Annenberg, anywhere in Aron Hall or the Atran buidling, Icahn floors 1 and 9-16, or at the SAVI program in 40 East 98th St.

If you have questions, you can contact the Levy Library Computing Help Desk at x47091 or helpdesk@mssm.edu. The network folks apologize for the inconvenience, but are happy to be upgrading our networks!

E-Journal Access Interruption

A warning to Night Owls - the system that does our e-journal full-text linking (it's called Serials Solutions) is going to be down for a few hours this weekend. After some back-and-forth with the company it's been determined that the downtime will be between 3 and 7 am on Saturday - a time when we suspect most of you will not be doing intensive literature searches. But just in case, we want to give you some information (which will also come in handy if there is ever any unplanned downtime).

The following WILL NOT WORK Saturday Oct. 23 between 3 and 7 am:

1. The Library's E-Journals page
2. The "yellow button" or FIND IT links, which appear in PubMed and most other databases.

The Work-Around:
If you are in PubMed, use the "blue button" when it's available - it'll still work.

If you're not in PubMed, try the following options:

• Find the article in PubMed and see if the blue button is there (it's not there for every article)
• Search the Library Catalog for the journal (select "periodical title" from the search pull-down menu to make your search a little more efficient). Many ejournals are linked to from the catalog.
• Search Google Scholar for the citation or journal. From the results page, click on the citation - this will work for some, but not all articles. Do NOT click on the "Resources @ Levy Library" link because it won't work during these hours. 
• Or, if you know the publisher, try one of our direct links below to some of our more popular pulishers, then search the publisher's site
  • American Chemical Society
  • American Heart Association Journals
  • American Medical Assocation Journals
  • American Physiological Society
  • American Society for Microbiology Journals
  • BMJ Journals
  • Informa Healthcare
  • LWW Total Access Collection
  • Nature Journals
  • Oxford University Press Journals
  • ScienceDirect
  • Springer Journals
  • Wiley Interscience Journals

Note: if you're off-campus, you'll still need to log in using your Mount Sinai username and password.

There's a little more information on this page: http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/journals/alternatives.cfm. We hope this doesn't cause too much inconvenience!

Website troubles

You might have noticed that both the Mount Sinai website and the Levy Library website have been going down periodically over the past couple of days. They're usually only down for a few minutes at a time, but it can be frustrating. So, here are some alternate links to get to Library Resources:

To access databases like PubMed, UpToDate, etc: http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/databases/

To access online journals: http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/journals/

To access e-books: http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/ebooks/

For information about the Library, including hours, policies, etc: http://www.mssm.edu/library/services/

And, you can always Ask a Librarian: http://www.mssm.edu/library/services/askus.shtml
(p.s. - should that site ever go down, you can call us at x47793 or x47204, or email us at refdesk@mssm.edu).

Remember to use the Library's link to PubMed!

We know, most of you have heard this a million times. But we're always surprised at how many people don't know that if you follow the link to PubMed from the Levy Library homepage (or right here: http://eresources.library.mssm.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?holding=mssmlib&otool=mssmlib) you'll have better access to the full text of articles. Once you are looking at the record for an article, you might see a blue button:

Click this button to go directly to the full text of the article.

You'll also see a yellow button:

Clicking this button will search for a full text version of the article that Sinai people have access to (it finds more full text than the blue button). If there isn't an online version of the article available, you'll be able to search our Catalog for a print copy with one click, or easily order the article through Interlibrary Loan. There's more information about all of this here, and as always, you can also Ask a Librarian.

p.s. - every once in a while, for some reason, the blue and yellow buttons disappear. Yikes! But if you are in PubMed and don't see the buttons, just close the window (saving your searches to a MyNCBI account, if you like) then open PubMed again by following the link from our homepage. That usually fixes the problem!

RefWorks Problems

We've been getting reports of a few different problems with RefWorks recently. The problems have been different and intermittent - they usually go away if you try again (you may need to log out first, and log back in). We're not sure what's going on, but we'll report them to RefWorks. Please let us know if you are having any RefWorks problems!

ACP Medicine and ACS Surgery are back!

After a few days of problems, our access to ACP Medicine and ACS Surgery has been restored. If you haven't used these resources before, take a look - ACP Medicine is an extensive, continually updated reference that contains articles reviewing a broad swath of topics in general internal medicine. ACS Surgery contains up-to-date articles on aspects of surgery from preoperative to postoperative care. Both include a "Weekly Curriculm" feature with review questions and explanations to keep your knowledge current. We believe all connectivity issues with these resources have been solved, but as always please let us know if you run into any problems using them.

Problems with ACP Medicine and ACS Surgery

Due to technical problems at the ACP and ACS, ACP Medicine and ACS Surgery are displaying a user login screen to Mount Sinai patrons trying to access them. This is an error and is preventing us from accessing these resources, both on and off campus. The problem is affecting many libraries and we're assured that they are working to fix it. In the meantime we're unable to access ACP Medicine and ACS Surgery. If you are having difficulty locating information you need, please contact us and we will suggest alternate resources.

Note: as far as we know, ACP Journal Club, which is on a different platform, is still working fine both on and off campus. Please let us know if you have any problems accessing ACP Journal Club or other resources.