Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine’s consumer health Web site, is celebrating its ten year anniversary.

MedlinePlus provides free, reputable information on health topics, drugs and supplements, the latest medical news, a medical dictionary, an encyclopedia, surgery videos, interactive educational material, information specifically for older Americans, and links to other sites to locate clinical trials and get more information on genetic conditions. Materials included on the site cover a variety of reading levels and languages, including Spanish.

For more information, see the NLM’s press release.

A recent study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found that over 75% of patients did not understand at least one part of their discharge instructions. Many other articles talk about the same issues related to a variety of settings and conditions.

Although there is not a single magic bullet to instantly solve all comprehension issues, there are a variety of materials available to help you provide the most effective patient care. Some of these are available to you as a part of library resource subscriptions, and some are available for free from government sources. A few places to start are MedlinePlus, the Micromedex CareNotes™ System, MD Consult, and Access Medicine.

When deciding which resource is best for a particular situation, some points to think about are:

• What grade level is it written at? Most experts recommend 4th grade or lower.
• Does it print out well? If you want to hand it out, you want something brief that prints effectively. You may also want a print-out for documentation purposes.
• Does it give your patient the option to get more information? Your patient may have further questions, or need terms defined.
• Does it come in multiple languages? Even if your patient speaks enough English to get through an appointment, he or she may still understand highly complex instructions or descriptions better in another language.
• Who wrote it? 

Stayed tuned — we will be discussing specific patient education resources in further detail in future posts!

Do you have a research project and have searched PubMed for the evidence to bolster your arguments and provide a review of the literature, but want to make sure you covered your area completely and haven’t missed anything?

Do you have a systematic review you are thinking about, and need to talk to an information expert for what databases to search and what terms to use for your search strategy?

Do you have some questions about a particular resource, like CINAHL Plus, or need assistance with using it effectively? Want to know more about the services and resources provided by the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library?

If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, schedule some one-on-one time with one of our information experts. Research consultation appointments with a librarian can be scheduled for about an hour and can take place in your office or favorite working space, or you can come in to the Biomedical Library. Consultations are only available for current UCLA students, staff, and faculty.

Ready to schedule? Please visit our online form or email us at biomed-ref@library.ucla.edu.

Whether you’re brand-new to open access (OA) or have been publishing in OA journals for years, October 14th is a day of note. SPARC, Students for Free Culture, and the Public Library of Science have declared today the first-ever Open Access Day.

Open Access is a publishing model for academic journals.  In the currently dominant publishing model, readers pay a fee to access scholarly articles (either individually or by paying for a subscription to a journal) and these fees support the publishing businesses. In an OA model, the authors or their institutions pay fees to support the publishers and the peer review process: after an article is published, any reader anywhere in the world can access the article freely. These different models have different implications for who can access and use the world’s scholarly information. Learn more about Open Access models of publication at SPARC’s Open Access page.

What can you do to support OA? Before you publish your next article, review the Directory of Open Access Journals and consider submitting to a journal that supports OA policies. When writing grant proposals, consider requesting funds to cover the costs of publishing in an OA journal. If you publish in or serve as a peer reviewer for a non-OA journal, talk to the publisher about adopting one of the Open Access models. Support the reliable OA journals in your field by reading and citing them.

Do you know how to locate educational materials to give to your patients– even in Spanish? Would you like to learn about other resources to use to locate educational materials? Attend the Health Literacy Open House!

The Open House will take place on Thursday, October 16 from 2 - 4 p.m. in the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Room B-120. During the Open House, you can practice using online resources and downloading patient education materials, view demonstrations of alternate resources, find out about CE credit opportunities in health literacy and patient education, and ask questions of librarians and members of the UCLA Health System Patient Education Committee.

What does the new NIH Public Access Policy mean for NIH-funded researchers at UCLA? As of April 7, 2008, researchers receiving grant money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must submit copies of their resulting research papers to PubMed Central (PMC) when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. PMC, the NIH’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, will then make the papers freely available to the public no later than twelve months after publication.

The UCLA Library is working with the UCLA Office of Research Administration to assist researchers in following this new mandate. Among the issues that will be discussed at these workshops are how to find out whether a publisher automatically submits papers to PMC, how and when to submit a paper to PMC if the publisher does not automatically do so, and how to locate PubMed Central reference numbers (PMCIDs).

• Monday, October 13, 2008
  10 a.m. - noon at the Biomedical Library

Or

• Tuesday, October 28, 2008
  1 - 3 p.m. at the Science and Engineering Library/Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Collection

Attendance is limited to UCLA faculty; advance registration is required. Admission is free, and refreshments will be provided. Space is limited, and reservations will be accepted in the order they are received. Register online.

For additional information about the workshop, contact Carol Nishijima at cnishiji@library.ucla.edu or 310.794.4019.  For questions specifically about the NIH policy, email nih@library.ucla.edu.

PubMed has created a new tool to convert PMCIDs to PMIDs and vice-versa. Every article citation in PubMed is tagged with a PubMed ID (PMID). Every article deposited into PubMedCentral  is tagged with a PubMedCentral ID (PMCID). Unfortunately, there is no linkage between these two different identification numbers: a PMCID has no correlation with a PMID.

The new PMID:PMCID Converter, created by the National Library of Medicine, makes it easy to look up a PMCID number by PMID, or look up a PMID number using the PMCID. Please note that not all articles indexed in PubMed are deposited into PubMedCentral, and not all articles in PubMedCentral are indexed in PubMed.

A recently-enacted National Institute of Health (NIH) policy requires all articles arising from NIH-funded grants be deposited in PubMedCentral. This policy also requires NIH grant applications to include PubMedCentral IDs for individual articles cited in the application (if the article is deposited in PubMedCentral).

Have questions about complying with the NIH access policy? Visit the UCLA Library’s  NIH Access Policy web page to get answers and get connected to resources to assist you.

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.

The UCLA Library is continuing our ongoing efforts to cancel print journal subscriptions when we license access to the electronic equivalent.  For 2008, we are focusing our efforts on the journals in all subjects identified by UCLA librarians where we have both print and electronic subscriptions. 

The 543 journal titles on the list and website have been identified by UCLA librarians where there is both a print and digital subscription and where they feel it is sufficient to have electronic access only.  If, however, you feel that it is important to maintain a print subscription to these titles, we would like to hear from you.

The list of proposed journal cancellations is available online through June 13, 2008. You can browse the list by holding library or individual title. Each title has an interactive button so you may send a comment directly to the librarian responsible for that subscription. If you have additional questions or comments please contact Janet Carter, Collection Coordinator for the UCLA Biomedical Library, at jcarter@library.ucla.edu.

The UCLA Library, Academic Senate, Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, and the Office of Intellectual Property Administration have created a series of lunchtime sessions to educate faculty about special topics in intellectual property. Upcoming sessions include:

• If You Don’t Ask, How Can You Tell?: Getting Permission to Use Material in Course Instruction and E-Publishing (December 6th, 2007)
• “Don’t I Own My Own Work?”: Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright (February 7th, 2008)
• “What Are My Rights?”: Software, Patents, and Open Source (spring quarter 2008; date TBA)

Read full descriptions of each workshop and register on the Library’s web page, Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: The Rights Stuff for Teaching and Publishing.