Medical Reference Services Quarterly最新文献

For more than 25 years, the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence has operated VAWnet, a freely available, online network focused on violence against women and other forms of gender-based violence. This column will provide an overview of the resources available from VAWnet, including a sample search that demonstrates how to access the resources available within as well as a discussion of how to effectively browse the thousands of materials available on VAWnet that provide life-saving information on gender-based violence and related issues.

Virtual reference services have become a staple in many libraries, but these services reached a new level of importance when in-person reference shut down in response to COVID-19. This descriptive study aims to discover how health sciences librarians utilized virtual reference services in response to the pandemic. A survey was developed and distributed to health sciences librarians. The survey addressed the status of virtual reference services before and during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as any changes that are seen as libraries reopen. Virtual reference shifted heavily to video conferencing during the pandemic both for librarians at home and those remaining onsite.

This study examines the frequency of misspellings in health sciences literature and explores how they affect citation retrieval in multiple databases. Searches for commonly misspelled medical words were conducted in PubMed, CINAHL Complete, APA PsycArticles (ProQuest), APA PsycInfo, and ProQuest Psychology databases. Citations that would be retrieved using a word's correct spelling were removed from the search results. Remaining results were citations that could only be retrieved if the word was misspelled in the search. Articles with clinical significance were targeted. The top five most commonly misspelled words were occurrence, ophthalmology, pruritus, sagittal, and resistance. Ophthalmology had the highest number of citations that contained at least one misspelling, with 57% of those citations "missing" when searched with the correct spelling of the word. The word with the highest percentage (82%) of missed citations was arrhythmia. The results of this study indicate that misspellings in scholarly literature are more prevalent than searchers might realize. The ability to retrieve citations is adversely affected by misspellings, which has the potential to affect patient care. Many opportunities exist in the editorial process to identify and correct misspellings before publication. This is less so once a journal is published. The implications for database searching and manuscript evaluation are discussed.

Previous investigations into trends in Library and Information Science literature have revealed changes in the topics librarians publish on over time, with older studies highlighting classification and indexing, and information retrieval and more recent studies highlighting keywords such as Internet, information technology, digital libraries, and again, information retrieval. No similar investigation has been conducted on current publication trends by health sciences librarians. This study analyzes the top themes on which health sciences librarians published from 2016 to 2020 by examining the frequency of keywords. Keywords and subject headings were analyzed from The Journal of the Medical Library Association, Medical References Services Quarterly, The Journal of Hospital Librarianship, and The Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries. A total of 8,806 keywords were downloaded for analysis and organized into 292 categories during taxonomy creation. The ten most frequent themes were: libraries, information, education, humans, demography, librarian, geographical locations, research, electronic resources, and technology. The study also found that data, psychiatry and psychology, informatics, and publishing were other key themes, indicating that health sciences librarians are publishing on a wide range of topics. Some keywords that appeared only once, such as telecommuting and flexible staffing, suggest emerging areas of research for librarians.

Spurred by the National Institute of Health mandating a data management and sharing plan as a requirement of grant funding, research data management has exploded in importance for librarians supporting researchers and research institutions. This editorial examines the role and direction of libraries in this process from several viewpoints. Key markers of success include collaboration, establishing new relationships, leveraging existing relationships, accessing multiple avenues of communication, and building niche expertise and cachè as a valued and trustworthy partner.

This column provides an overview of the Virtual Health Library (VHL) Regional Portal, a resource provided by Pan American Health Organization and others with the purpose of communicating and exchanging health experiences and information for Latin American and Caribbean countries. The content is organized in four sub-portals: the VHL Model, which describes health information and knowledge management to structures and guides; LILACS, the Latin American and Caribbean Index Health Science Literature; DeCS, Descriptors Health Sciences, a controlled vocabulary; and Training, which gathers and organizes information for librarians, developers, and users who are interested in construction and use of VHL methodologies. An overview of the resource and sample search is discussed.