Medical Reference Services Quarterly最新文献

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.

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.