Medical Reference Services Quarterly最新文献

Increased requests for assistance with literature searches on educational topics within the health professions motivated two health science librarians to analyze search function and results in eleven bibliographic databases on questions representing three allied health instructional target populations (patient, caregiver, and future health professionals). Results overlap and relevance were estimated and useful functions and subject headings were examined, as evidence for future search and database recommendations. This research confirmed the authors' hypothesis that PubMed and CINAHL overlapped significantly yet yielded sufficient unique citations to recommend searching both, plus at least one education-specific database. For the six questions researched, psychology and sports medicine databases were less productive.

The growth of digital health has led to more app-based solutions entering the market which aim to provide therapeutic outcomes for a variety of diseases. This column explores the emerging field of digital therapeutics (DTx) as evidence-based and FDA-cleared digital interventions - setting them apart from the majority of commercially available solutions. In an effort to identify high quality and evidence-based options, medical and health science librarians can benefit from recognizing the qualifications of DTx, types of available DTx, and use cases for their patrons.

Bookshelf is a database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine that contains freely accessible online biomedical documents, including systematic reviews, technical reports, textbooks, and reference books. The database allows users to browse and search across all content and within individual books, and it is linked to other NCBI content. This article provides an overview of Bookshelf and demonstrates its usage in a sample search. The resources available in Bookshelf are useful for students, researchers, healthcare professionals, and librarians.

Librarians collaborate in their positions daily to assist patrons with their needs. Many of these interactions are brief with collaborations quickly forming and then being dissolved as librarians provide for the needs of their patrons. Collaborations allow librarians to advance the purposes of the library and reach out and assist the institution. Unlike these brief daily interactions, research collaborations require librarians to make long-term commitments to projects. How can we ensure that these collaborations are successful? Study of research collaborations can assist librarians in determining how to build and maintain research collaborations and avoid or overcome conflicts and barriers. Finding others with similar interests, maintaining communication through multiple channels, and basic project management skills are key to successful research collaborations.

Due to the rapid growth of information technology and medical information resources, medical personnel need to search and retrieve valid and updated information. However, with limited time to access these resources, there is a need for clinical librarians to connect medical staff to evidence-based medicine (EBM). The present study was conducted to identify the challenges in the absence and the benefits of the presence of clinical librarians in the application of EBM in clinical departments. Ten clinical physicians working at Children's Medical Center Hospital in Tehran, Iran were interviewed for this qualitative study. Most of the hospital-based physicians did not make any systematic use of EBM and seven were not familiar with the term "clinical librarian." In their opinion, the clinical librarians' activities included training the clinical and research teams, providing them with the required information, and providing an EBM-oriented approach to morning report and educational rounds. Therefore, the services delivered by clinical librarians in various hospital departments might positively influence the hospital-based physicians' information-seeking behavior.

Health sciences librarians may be experiencing a fundamental sense of disconnection from medical students as the reliance on online resources and post-pandemic acceptance of remote learning chip away at use of the physical library. In response, librarians have investigated a variety of virtual approaches to counter the loss of face-to-face contact with patrons. Numerous reports in the literature explore ways to build virtual relationships with patrons. This case study discusses a project by the Savitt Medical Library of the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine to implement a Personal Librarian Program that promoted communication between librarians and learners.

Conducting comprehensive but efficient literature searches for complex evidence syntheses involves selecting databases that will retrieve the greatest number of relevant results on the question. Lack of a comprehensive single database on allied health educational topics challenges those seeking such literature. In this study, six participants contributed research questions on instructional methods and materials for allied health patients, caregivers, and future health professionals. Two health sciences librarians created search strategies for these questions and searched eleven databases. Both the librarians and the six participants evaluated the search results using a rubric based on PICO to assess extent of alignment between the librarians' and requestors' relevance judgments. Intervention, Outcome, and Assessment Method constituted the most frequent bases for assessments of relevance by both librarians and participants. The librarians were more restrictive in all of their assessments except in a preliminary search yielding twelve citations without abstracts. The study's results could be used to identify effective techniques for reference interviewing, selecting databases, and weeding search results.

The authors compare and contrast the structure and function of librarians and library services using a convenience sample online survey of pediatric hospitals in the Southeast based on the rankings from the Regional U.S. News & World Report Best Children's Hospitals and Magnet status. This approach is intended to determine how librarians and library services at hospitals that are recognized by the above programs differ from those that are not recognized.