Medical Reference Services Quarterly最新文献

Librarians' involvement in Evidence-Based Medical Practice (EBMP) has been widely reported from the Global North. The cross-sectional study designed a survey to investigate how African medical librarians integrate into EBMP. The respondents comprised medical librarians from 12 African countries. Findings revealed that African medical librarians are mostly involved in EBMP activities related to resource use, management, and evidence dissemination. The leading EBMP tools reportedly used or promoted by the librarians include UpToDate and Cochrane Library, while the leading challenges encountered in offering support for EBMP are related to skill deficiency, poor funding, and poor internet connectivity.

Public libraries serve as sources of health information, and partnerships between public and academic health sciences libraries may improve a community's access to and understanding of health information. Librarians at a medical school in Kentucky conducted interviews with public librarians to better understand their experiences with health information with the goal of informing future outreach to public libraries. All participants reported receiving requests for health-related information at least occasionally. Most participants used books to answer health questions, although a wide range of electronic resources were also used. Implications for academic health sciences librarians are discussed.

This article examines the development and implementation of a customized Python script utilizing the Elsevier Scopus and Clarivate Web of Science Journal Citation Reports Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The aim was to streamline and expedite the labor-intensive process of collecting research metrics, which were traditionally compiled manually by librarians at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Louis Calder Memorial Library. The script significantly reduces the time and effort required to generate comprehensive reports on research productivity, thereby enabling more efficient resource allocation and aiding in faculty evaluations.

Created by the NIH in 2015, the Common Data Elements (CDE) Repository provides free online access to search and use Common Data Elements. This tool helps to ensure consistent data collection, saves time and resources, and ultimately improves the accuracy of and interoperability among datasets. The purpose of this column is to provide an overview of the database, discuss why it is important for researchers and relevant for health sciences librarians, and review the basic layout of the website, including sample searches that will demonstrate how it can be used.

Systems librarianship, when merged with the position of informationist, evolves into the identity of the systems informationist in the hospital setting. The Health Sciences Library at Geisinger has successfully implemented a systems informationist role within an open systems framework. The duties of the systems informationist are framed here using: input for information-seeking behavior; throughput of clinical support for patient care; output by user experience in research and education; and feedback to elevate operational excellence. This case report contributes a focused approach to systems librarianship, providing examples for other hospital libraries that may be interested in developing their own Systems Services.

To help address the well-being of the campus and contribute to empathy building amongst students pursuing careers as healthcare providers, an academic health sciences library built a graphic novel collection focused on comics that discuss medical conditions and health-related topics. The collection contains the experiences of patients, providers, and caregivers. The reader-friendly format of graphic novels provides an easy entry point for discussing empathy with health professions faculty and students. The collection has been used in the classroom during library instruction sessions, with the idea of integrating it within the curriculum.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) instruction is required for physician assistant (PA) students. As a follow-up to an initial didactic year survey, this study seeks to understand which attributes of EBM resources clinical PA students find most and least useful, their self-efficacy utilizing medical literature, and their usage of EBM tools in the clinic. Results indicate that students preferred UpToDate and PubMed. PA students valued ease of use, which can inform instructors and librarians. Respondents utilized EBM tools daily or a few days a week, underscoring the importance of EBM tools in real-world scenarios. After their clinical year, students felt moderately confident utilizing the medical literature, emphasizing EBM training.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a powerful computer system that utilizes various computing strategies to extract information from raw text input, since the early 1990s. With rapid advancement in AI and computing, NER models have gained significant attention and been serving as foundational tools across numerus professional domains to organize unstructured data for research and practical applications. This is particularly evident in the medical and healthcare fields, where NER models are essential in efficiently extract critical information from complex documents that are challenging for manual review. Despite its successes, NER present limitations in fully comprehending natural language nuances. However, the development of more advanced and user-friendly models promises to improve work experiences of professional users significantly.

While LibGuides are widely used in libraries to curate resources for users, there are a number of common problems, including maintenance, design and layout, and curating relevant and concise content. One health sciences library sought to improve our LibGuides, consulting usage statistics, user feedback, and recommendations from the literature to inform decision making. Our team recommended a number of changes to make LibGuides more usable, including creating robust maintenance and content guidelines, scheduling regular updates, and various changes to the format of the guides themselves to make them more user-friendly.

The objective of this study was to examine the accuracy of indexing for "Appalachian Region"[Mesh]. Researchers performed a search in PubMed for articles published in 2019 using "Appalachian Region"[Mesh] or "Appalachia" or "Appalachian" in the title or abstract. Only 17.88% of the articles retrieved by the search were about Appalachia according to the ARC definition. Most articles retrieved appeared because they were indexed with state terms that were included as part of the mesh term. Database indexing and searching transparency is of growing importance as indexers rely increasingly on automated systems to catalog information and publications.