Levy Library

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!

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/!

Biology info - from genomes to jobs

Much as we like seeing everyone's smiling faces in the library, we know that it's usually easier and quicker to find your information online - which is of course why we provide so many online journals, databases, books, etc., etc. But, sorting through them to find a good protocol to inoculate ferrets with influenza or the most recent impact factor of the Journal of Arachnology may not be as easy as googling Sarah Palin, so we make an effort to provide some suggestions and search tips for you.

The Library's How Do I? page has links to information ranging from how to renew a book to how to stay in compliance with the NIH Open Access policy to how to do IRB-required literature searches for animal testing alternatives. Some of the newest guides are the Biology Resources guide, which includes links to find protocols, articles, gene sequences, protein interactions, and lots more; and the Biology Career Resources guide, which includes links to sites with job listings and career advice as well as a list of the Career books that we have in the library (both print and online). Take a look, save some bookmarks, and of course let us know if you have any questions, comments or ideas for more ways we can help with your research!

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!

Names and Numbers

 

I was trying to come up with some good searching examples this morning, and kept running into an old problem with library research - trying to keep authors with similar names separate, while at the same time trying to keep track of researchers who may have published under more than one name. Sure, many resesarchers try to consistently publish under the same name (e.g. continuing to use a maiden name instead of a married name), but sometimes journal formats and database indexers make this difficult: an author may appear as J O'Brien in one journal, JP O Brien in another, and James OBrien in a third. You can find all of these names by using ORs and truncation in your searches (e.g. obrien j* OR o'brien j* OR o brien j* in Web of Science), but then you'll also retrieve everything by John and Joan and Joaquin O'Brien, not to mention that other James O'Brien (I once knew a researcher who'd never had a middle name; he adopted an initial in graduate school in an attempt to differentiate himself from the other researcher in the same field who had the same name). So, what to do? Unfortunately, there are still no good solutions. Many scientists and publishers are advocating the development of a numbering system to keep track of who wrote what - this would be beneficial, but would most likely require each author to ensure that each of their publications is linked to their unique number. Database developers are also working on algorithms to separate papers into groups likely written by the same author, but researchers with name changes, institution changes and new research directions tend to stay a few steps ahead of those algorithms.

If you're interested in some of the potential solutions, take a look at this recent Science article by Martin Enserink (link works on campus only), and http://www.researcherid.com from Thomson-Reuters.

In the meantime, if you are trying to find all the articles by a certain H. Wang or J. Smith, you can try to narrow down your results list by adding other information to your search, such as institutional affiliation, publication years or subject keywords, but be prepared for a mixed bag of results!

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.

Visualizing Article Citations

You might already know that you can use Web of Science to look up articles that have cited one of your papers, or a paper of interest to you. This can be a great way to find related articles, especially if your topic is obscure or hard to search for. Now, Web of Science's new Citation Mapper tool adds another level to citation searching: starting with one article of interest, you can build a map of citations, going backward and forward up to two generations. You'll generate a web-like map of citation connections that you can color-code and label according to author, journal, subject, institution and more.

For example, try starting with Dr. Jeffrey Laitman's 1997 article in the American Journal of Medicine, "The human aerodigestive tract and gastroesophageal reflux: an evolutionary perspective". By finding this record in the Web of Science and clicking its "Citation Map" link, you can generate a map (I used the options to generate a map of 2 generations, forwards and backwards). Using the map's Appearance button to set the Node Text to Subject Category, you can see that this General Medicine article was cited by papers in Immunology, Dentistry, Nursing and Neurosciences journals, which were in turn cited by articles in journals about subjects ranging from Acoustics to Pediatrics. This can be a great visual to track the evolution of an idea or, if you Citation Map your own articles, to find potential interdisciplinary collaborators.

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.