Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences has been called “one of the greatest scientific publications of the 21st century.” UCLA has online access to all 26 volumes of this groundbreaking reference work, which includes articles covering biology, virology, science and society, ecology, genetics, neuroscience, and plant science. The encyclopedia’s 4300 articles are clearly marked as including introductory, intermediate, or advanced content, and include color illustrations and tables. Each article includes a glossary with definitions of technical terms, acronyms, and taxonomical and biochemical information, and hyperlinks provide easy access to related content within the encyclopedia.

The California Digital Library has recently licensed the electronic version of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for all 10 campuses in the UC system. UCLA researchers have had access to these reports since 2001. JCR provides quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data, measures research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and shows the relationship between citing and cited journals.

JCR is available for the sciences and the social sciences and can be helpful when selecting journals to publish your writing or locating impact factors for peer review documentation or grant applications.

Note that the JCR data only goes through 2007 at this point. JCR’s methods require a full calendar year of data be collected. 2008 data will be analyzed beginning in 2009, and the information on 2008 journals will likely be available in fall 2009.

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.

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.

Please join us at “Mollusks & More,” an exhibit showcasing the skill and art of the 18th and 19th century engravers and illustrators in creating images of cephalopods, mollusks, and other sea creatures. The materials are on display in the History and Special Collections for Sciences Division on the 4th floor of the Biomedical Library through September 30, 2008.

There is still time to visit the exhibit “Revealing Hidden Collections,” open through August 29 at the Charles E. Young Research Library.

With countless manuscript pages, photographs, surgical instruments, leech jars and ephemeral items, the UCLA Library’s Special Collections contain a wealth of material waiting to be discovered. These materials may be “hidden” for a variety of reasons: people may not realize that the Library owns them, their contents may be uncataloged, or they may be part of a collection that has not yet been fully inventoried.

This exhibit, in the foyer of the Young Research Library, features items from the holdings of the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections for the Sciences, Performing Arts Special Collections, and the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections.

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.

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.