Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

MICROMEDEX is a collection of many different drug, toxicology, disease, and labs databases, including Martindale, the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR), DISEASEDEX, POISONDEX, and several alternative medicine databases. The MICROMEDEX Evidence/Healthcare Series helps you identify drugs and determine dosing, side effects, and interactions. Drugs can be searched by trade name, generic name, street name, topic, imprint code, color, shape or pattern. The IV Index provides IV compatibility between multiple drugs. MICROMEDEX also provides many calculators for dosing tools, drug comparisons, laboratory values, and much more. The CareNotes System provides patient education handouts in English and Spanish. MICROMEDEX is accessible from your handheld PDA via Thomson Clinical Xpert.

Use the Africa Development Indicators database to locate information on the African economy. It contains over 1,000 indicators and time series from 1965 to the present for 53 countries. Data include social, economic, financial, natural resources, infrastructure, governance, partnership, and environmental indicators.

UCLA will have trial access to this database through August 31, 2008. Continue reading this post to learn how to access the database and how to submit your comments on the database. (more…)

On July 23, one of the participating programs of the 2008 UCLA Summer Programs for Graduate Research (SPGR) will host a symposium. It has been described by Heather Tarleton (via email on 16 July 2008), UCLA Graduate Division, as:

“The scholars of the DISE program (Developing an Interface for Science and Ethics) are putting together a symposium focusing on the role of ethics in research.   The event will largely consist of a panel of faculty and other researchers as well as interactive discussions and activities with the audience.  The primary goal is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to ethics within research for future researchers and scholars.”

Interested in attending? It is from 2-4pm on the 23rd in the Neuroscience Research Building (NRB) Auditorium. Attendance at this event is limited to UCLA students, staff, and faculty. Please RSVP online.

Do you use EndNote? If so, read on for some of my tips and tricks for this tool and another tool that might fit your needs better.

If you don’t use EndNote, use the comments to indicate what tools you use for keeping track of your citations. Then, we will post some tips and tricks for those tools too!

EndNote

Do you enter each reference by hand? Believe me…there is a better way. Let your favorite databases work for you! There are options in PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Global Health, and most other databases where you can either import the search results directly into your EndNote library or save them and import them. Either way, you are saving keystrokes and headaches. Need help with this? Just schedule a research consultation appointment with us.

Did you know you could link your PDF file for the article to the reference in your EndNote Library? You can! Depending on your version of the software, look for a Link to or File Attachments field in a record, then navigate to the PDF file and voila! EndNote is nifty…it organizes your references and some of those files on your computer too. Now, if only EndNote would organize my desk!

EndNote Web

Do you find yourself hopping from one computer to the next when you are doing your research? Okay…well I have a tool for you…EndNote Web! It is free for current UCLA students, faculty, and staff and, if you work with others, you can share specific references with them by using the Manage Sharing feature for that group of citations.

Want to know more about these and other citation management tools (such as Procite, Ref Works, or Reference Manager)? Check out our page on Citation Management Tools.

Do you have tips and tricks that you’d like to share for these and other citation managment tools? Please share them by leaving a comment below.

Store PDF files with Papers and create a customized, searchable library. Click and drag  PDFs on your computer into Papers and use Papers’ integrated search feature to look for new papers in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and more.  The Papers interface integrates features of other popular software packages to add value to the way you use scientific literature:

• Create smart folders that automatically update as you import new articles into your library.
• Use folders to organize related articles, and assign keywords to articles.
• Select, highlight, and write notes on articles or figures.
• Rate individual papers with a series of stars. 
• Use tabbed browsing to view and compare multiple articles simultaneously.

Individuals must purchase a license for Papers, and it is only available for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher.

The Global Infectious Disease & Epidemiology Network (GIDEON) is comprised of Diagnosis, Epidemiology, Therapy, and Microbiology modules. Modules include over 300 diseases, 10,000 notes outlining the status of specific infections for 200+ foreign countries, 1100 microbial taxa, and more than 300 antibacterial (-fungal, -parasitic, -viral) agents and vaccines. Data is taken from national health ministry reports, WHO technical reports, monographs, and journals. Results provide a ranked differential diagnosis that considers patient symptoms, travel, incubation period, laboratory test results, and immune status. Comparisons of clinical and laboratory features for two or more diseases are available.

Do you find yourself going to many different journal’s websites to read their tables of contents? Save time by signing up for alerts so the table of contents will automatically come to you. Nature journals offers this service. 

Simply register for an account to receive Table of Contents e-alerts. E-mail alerts save you time by sending an email to your inbox at the time of online publication, allowing you to browse the latest content immediately.

Set up a free account at Web of Knowledge to be notified when articles are cited. This can alert you to potential collaborators who are working on similar topics, assist you with locating articles on similar topics, and help you know how widely your work is being disseminated.

 The Web of Knowledge database (containing Science Citation Index and more) is interdisciplinary and includes citations to materials in the health and life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities.  Personalized accounts are free. Create one, and sign in on subsequent visits, by clicking the  button at the top of any page inside the Web of Knowledge database.

You can set up citation alerts to send you an email or subscribe to an RSS feed.  To set up an alert, search Web of Knowledge for the paper you wish to use as the subject of the alert. Click on the title of the paper to view the full record (see screenshot below of a full record).  

Click on the  button on the right-hand side of the page to set up an alert, which will be active for one year from the date of creation. You will receive an email whenever your article is cited by another article in the Web of Knowledge database.

To view all your alerts, subscribe to an RSS feed for a citation alert, or renew an alert for another year, click the  link at the top of any page inside the Web of Knowledge database.

Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) Protocols is a database that includes protocols covering cell and molecular biology, neuroscience, genetics, bioinformatics, imaging, and more. 

Users can subscribe via RSS feed for new protocols, topic introductions (articles that provide general and background information, theory and applications for methods), and information panels (smaller discrete pieces of information relevant to particular methods). Subscribing to an RSS feed will allow the information to come to you, rather than you having to seek it out yourself. 

Read more about RSS feeds in our blog post entitled Tools for keeping up: using RSS feeds and other features of resources.

On Tuesday July 1 we alerted you to access and link problems with Wiley Interscience e-journals. As of July 2, full access has been restored to all UCLA-subscribed Wiley Interscience e-journals. There are still remaining problems with links to individual articles. All UC-eLinks icons in databases, the UCLA Library Catalog, or on Library web pages have been modified to take you to the individual article. Other links may take you to the main Wiley Interscience web page. In this case, you will still be able to navigate to the individual journal web page and locate your needed article.

Our technical staff are working to resolve these problems as soon as possible.

If you experience any access or link problems to UCLA-subscribed content, please contact the Biomedical Library.