Levy Library

More PubMed Help

We've just completed our (approximately) annual update of the PubMed Tutorial - a bigger task than usual given the recent changes to the PubMed interface. If you're a little confused by  the new interface, or if you're a casual searcher who wants to learn more about effective PubMed searching (hint: there is a lot more you can do with it than just type a few words into the search box!), take a look. If you work through the tutorial in detail, doing all of the exercises and everything, it will take about one well-spent hour. Or, use the menu to pick and choose exactly what you want to brush up on. Spending a few minutes now can save you a lot of time and frustration later!

You can also check out our How Do I...? page of search guides and handouts for updated information about PubMed, including the new Advanced Search screen as well as how to import references to RefWorks and EndNote. And as always, if you have a question, Ask a Librarian!

PubMed: Back to the Future

PubMed has switched to its new interface again, and maybe for good this time! If you often use features like Limits, MeSH headings and the Search History (and we librarians think you should!) you'll notice that the new interface looks very different. At the Library we've been playing with the beta version for a few weeks now and are figuring out where things are and new ways of doing things. We're in the midst of updating all of our webguides and tutorials and aren't done yet, but here are links to a few guides to answer questions you may have:

Where things are in the new interface (PDF)
Introduction to PubMed (PDF)
Connecting to Full-Text (PDF)
Field Searching (PDF)
MeSH Searching (PDF)

Also, the PubMed Tutorial for Biologists is mostly up to date with the new interface - and we're working on the tutorial for all you non-biologists, too!

Of course, you can always ask us if you have questions. And we'll give you probably the best piece of advice for finding things in the new interface: when in doubt, try the Advanced Search screen.

PubMed has Changed!

The long-awaited PubMed redesign has been completed! On your next visit, you'll notice the look has changed pretty significantly - and some of the tools you are used to using may not be where you expect them to be. Don't fret - everything is still there, just in different places. We are busily working to update all of our PubMed user guides (I'll post links when they're ready) but in the meantime please ask us if you need any assistance, or check out this article in the National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin if you're curious about the changes.

The Classes are Back!

After a renovation-induced hiatus, we are happy to announce that we are teaching drop-in classes again in the Levy Library - and in a new, renovated space, no less! The schedule and registration form are up now at http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/classes/.

Notice especially that there are two new classes: for the first time we will be teaching a Photoshop class that will help you improve your images for publications and presentations (without distorting or falsifying your data), and we also have several sessions to orient you to the new PubMed interface - it's in Beta-testing now and will soon be the only way to search PubMed.

EndNote X3: Advanced Features
11/19/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00
12/17/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00 
 
EndNote X3: An Introduction
10/29/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00 
11/12/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00
 12/10/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00
 
Genome Browsers - UCSC, Ensembl and NCBI Map Viewer
12/02/2009 (Wednesday) 4:00 - 5:30
 
NCBI's Entrez and Blast: An Introduction
11/03/2009 (Tuesday) 4:00 - 5:30
12/14/2009 (Monday) 4:00 - 5:30 
 
Photoshop: Preparing Images for Publication
12/03/2009 (Thursday) 4:00 - 5:00
 
PowerPoint 2007: An Introduction
10/27/2009 (Tuesday) 4:00 - 5:30 
 
PowerPoint: Finding Images and Using Them in Presentations
12/08/2009 (Tuesday) 4:00 - 5:30
 
PubMed: Navigating the New Interface
11/10/2009 (Tuesday) 4:00 - 5:00
11/12/2009 (Thursday) 12:00 - 1:00
12/09/2009 (Wednesday) 4:00 - 5:00 
 
RefWorks: An Introduction
11/17/2009 (Tuesday) 4:00 - 5:00
12/16/2009 (Wednesday) 4:00 - 5:00

Register at http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/classes/!

Clinical Skills Week Resources

Last week was clinical skills week, when we got to meet all of the medical students entering their third year and learning some of the skills they'll need for their clerkships. One of those skills is being able to find the information necessary for patient care, so reference librarians Polly and Laura shared some of their favorite resources. Here they are, with a word about each:

PubMed: What library workshop would be complete with mention of PubMed? (OK, so there are a few). Specifically, remember MeSH searching, Boolean operators and the Limits tab, and try the Clinical Queries tool (found in the blue bar on the left side of the PubMed homepage) when you are looking for research studies for specific question types - e.g., therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, etc.

AccessMedicine, MDConsult, and the E-books database are good sources for textbook-style background information and sometimes images, videos, guidelines and more.

UpToDate (on campus only), eMedicine and PIER are full of clinical topic reviews that combine the latest evidence with expert recommendations.

ACP Journal Club and the Cochrane Library are evidence-based medicine resources: ACP Journal Club provides structured reviews and commentary on selected high-quality articles from 100+ journals, while the Cochrane Library publishes systematic reviews and meta-analyses of highly relevant topics. Search them separately using the above links, or together using EBM Reviews.

And, as always, you can Ask a Librarian. Happy third year!

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!

Getting Specific with PubMed

Ever get curious what your fellow Mount Sinai researchers are publishing? At the Library we like to keep track of what people are up to in their research by occasionally running a PubMed search for Mount Sinai authors. You can just type Sinai into the search box, of course, but that gives you all kinds of results, ranging from authors named Sinai to hemoglobin variants called Sinai. To narrow it down, try searching sinai[affl]; this will only return results with the word Sinai in the author affiliation field (tip: use sinai[affl] AND york[affl] to make sure you're not getting results from Cedars-Sinai in LA or Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto). Then, use the Limits tab to limit your results to recent articles - say 30 days. You can also use quotation marks and field tags to specify the exact number of days you're interested in - for example, a search for sinai[affl] AND york[affl] AND "last 7 days"[pdat] currently returns citations to 7 articles by Mount Sinai authors that have been published and added to PubMed in the past week.

To make all this even easier, just run the search once, then set up a MyNCBI account and save the search to have it rerun as often as you like, and get the results emailed to you. This can be a convenient way to keep up with what is being published by an author or institution, or in a particular journal or subject area.

And a reminder, always use the link to PubMed from the Levy Library's homepage - that way you can connect to full-text articles using our LinkOut and FindIt buttons!

New MeSH Terms for 2009

 The National Library of Medicine has released a list of data changes for 2009. There are 446 new MeSH terms describing brand new concepts for 2009 including: Stem Cell Niche, Natural Killer T-Cells, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus, Prescription Drugs, Medication Adherence, Early Detection of Cancer, Illness Behavior, Evidence-Based Practice, Integrative Medicine, Journal Impact Factor, Drug Users, Moving and Lifting Patients and more.  There is also a new check tag for Young Adult (Ages: 19-24). Since having new MeSH terms for the topics you search can make your work easier, you may want to see if any new MeSH terms have been added to your field(s) of interest.  To see a list of new MeSH Headings of special interest to searchers click here, to see the whole list of 446, listed by subject, click here.  Look for these new MeSH terms only on references newly added to PubMed - since NLM does not retrospectively re-index Medline citations with new MeSH headings.

PubMed Changes

A couple of changes have been made to PubMed lately, and there are more coming up. If you're a frequent PubMed user, you may have noticed some changes in how your search results are displayed. Article titles are now listed before the authors, and the title functions as the link to the full record. This should make it a bit easier to scan your list of results. Also, the links to find Related Articles have been moved underneath each citation instead of next to it, and the icons that previously indicated the presence of free full text or abstracts have been replaced with statements like "Free Article in PMC". This makes it really easy to see which articles are available for free from PubMed Central, but remember that Mount Sinai provides access to many more full text articles using the LinkOut and FindIt services.

And if you haven't yet taken a look at PubMed's new "Advanced Search" feature, now might be a good time. In the next few weeks the familiar tabs for Limits, History, Details and others will disappear - all the functions will be accessible from the Advanced Search screen. We don't know yet if the same thing will happen to other NCBI databases, like Entrez Gene. In any case, if you have questions about PubMed or other resources, you can always Ask a Librarian!

Happy Birthday Frederick Banting

It's the United Nations' World Diabetes Day today, scheduled on November 14 to mark the birthday of Frederick Banting, one of the co-discoverers of insulin. The theme this year is Diabetes in Children and Adolescents. As you can imagine, PubMed provides citations to many thousands of articles about pediatric diabetes - a search for diabetes mellitus as a major topic heading limited to All Child: 0-18 years returns nearly 2000 review articles, not to mention research articles, clinical studies, news and opinion articles; even a list of "Tips and Tricks for Halloween". To find information about diabetes in adolescents and children, you should probably get more specific and add more search terms to a PubMed search. Or, for general information about the disease and its treatment try a database like UpToDate (on campus only) or eMedicine, or look in an ebook.

And what if you want to go back to Frederick Banting's original research on pancreatic extracts? PubMed generally only contains citations back to the 1940s or so. Dr. Banting's Nobel Prize winning work was done in the 1920s so it's not in PubMed (though you can find a citation to a 1937 Science article of his). Instead, try an author search for Banting FG in Web of Science, which includes citations back to around 1900.