HSLS Staff News

The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, etc.

News

Barbara Epstein, HSLS Director and Medical Library Association President, was interviewed about National Medical Librarians Month by Dr. Ira Breite on Doctor Radio/SiriusXM 110 on October 2, 2017.

Erin Seger

Erin Seger joined NNLM MAR as the Health Professions Coordinator on September 18. Erin received a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Illinois and has a Bachelor of Science degree in Community Health Education. She has been a Certified Health Education Specialist since 2009. Most recently, she was a health educator embedded in the health learning center at Northwestern Medical Center. Continue reading

Classes for November 2017

HSLS offers classes on database searching, software applications such as Prezi, bibliographic management, and molecular biology and genetics. For more information, visit the online class calendar.

Classes are held on the first floor of Falk Library (200 Scaife Hall) in Classroom 1 and on the upper floor of the library in Classroom 2. All classes are open to faculty, staff, and students of the University of Pittsburgh. They are also open to UPMC residents and fellows, who will need to show their UPMC IDs.
Continue reading

Creative Opportunities

C4C logoOver the years, journals such as Academic Medicine, Journal of Nursing Education, and the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education have published articles about the benefit of creative outlets for students through visual arts and creative writing.

The University’s Center for Creativity celebrates the creative process as exercised across academic and research disciplines. Its first facility, the Workshop, opened last year in the lower level of the University Store on Fifth. Open to all Pitt faculty, staff, and students, the Workshop is a place to “make stuff” and to work through questions through hands-on activity. Continue reading

New Quiet Study Area in Falk Library

Desks in new quiet study areaFrequent visitors to the library may note how it can be a busy place, and not always quiet. You may find yourself distracted by others setting up at a computer, getting papers from the printer, or just chatting with fellow classmates during a study break. In response to the student requests, a new quiet study area has opened on Falk Library’s main floor. An enclosed area separate from the main part of the library, the quiet study room seats 44 at individual study carrels, with a four-seat table also available. The room entrance is located beyond the bookshelves in the far left corner of the library’s main floor. The entrance will soon be programmed for swipe card access for health sciences students using their Pitt ID cards. Continue reading

What’s in a Name: Web of Science, Web of Science Core, Web of Science Databases, Science Citation Index, etc…

Web of Science goes by many different names, contains more than just science, and is more than citation indexes. So let’s start with some background.

Science Citation Index was first available in 1964. It was created by Eugene Garfield and produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). It is now owned by Clarivate Analytics. Science Citation Index and other citation indexes are used to identify what later articles have cited any earlier article, have cited the articles of a particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Continue reading

You Want to Know What? “Interesting” Questions HSLS Librarians Have Gotten Over the Years

Cartoon, librarian says to patron, "So basically you are looking for books on changing everyone except yourself."Before Google, librarians were a major source for all types of information. Since the birth of Google in 1998, it really hasn’t changed all that much. October is National Medical Librarians Month, so this is a good time to write about “interesting” questions HSLS librarians have received over the years. Some are funny, odd, or just unusual.

  • Years ago, an outside user came to the library asking to be directed to the book section on ophthalmology. He thought Jane Pauley was working for the FBI and was spying on him. The librarian directed him to the ophthalmology section and wished him well.

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HSLS Staff News

The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, etc.

News

Carrie Iwema, Molecular Bioinformationist, received a $1,500 stipend from the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute to attend the Programming in Biology course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, from October 16–31, 2017.

Publications

Author names in bold are HSLS-affiliated

Jonathon Erlen, history of medicine librarian, along with co-author Megan Conway, publishedDisability Studies: Disabilities Abstracts” in The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 13(2-3), 2017.

U.K. Bansal, C. Jones, T.W. Fuller, C. Wessel, Head of Research Initiatives, et al., published “Efficacy of Tadalafil Daily Versus on Demand in the Treatment of Erectile Dysfunction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” in Urology, September 4, 2017. (Epub ahead of print)

Poster

Author name in bold is HSLS-affiliated

Rebecca Abromitis, Research and Instruction Librarian, presented “How Does Pretesting for PubMed Knowledge Spark Student Learning?” at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Academy of Master Educators Second Annual Med Ed Day, on September 8, 2017.

Classes for October 2017

HSLS offers classes on database searching, software applications such as Prezi, bibliographic management, and molecular biology and genetics. For more information, visit the online class calendar.

Classes are held on the first floor of Falk Library (200 Scaife Hall) in Classroom 1 and on the upper floor of the library in Classroom 2. All classes are open to faculty, staff, and students of the University of Pittsburgh. They are also open to UPMC residents and fellows, who will need to show their UPMC IDs.
Continue reading

Power Dissemination: Five Ways to Open Your Research to the World

Publish in an Open Access journal. This assures that everyone has access to the full text of an article from the moment it is published, and authors retain all copyrights and can continue to use their content in the same or other ways. Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to search for journals, or check The Eigenfactor Index of Open Access Fees, a tool quantifying the cost-effectiveness of open access journals represented in Journal Citation Reports.

Take advantage of publishers’ offers of post-publication sharing policies with HowCanIShareIt.com from the repository Figshare, a project supported by most of the major publishers. Scroll down to browse Publisher Sharing Policies. Another excellent resource is Sherpa/Romeo, where you can confirm journal copyright policies. Continue reading

Director’s Reflections…Welcome to HSLS!

BarbaraEpstein2014_gray
Barbara Epstein
HSLS Director
bepstein@pitt.edu

Welcome to all our new and returning students and faculty! After the relative quiet of the summer, it’s refreshing to see new faces, greet old friends, and feel renewed energy in the air.

You will see many changes underway in Falk Library. While there will still be the same number of study seats in the library, the “fishbowl” quiet study area is closed permanently, and the study carrels are being relocated to the opposite end of the library’s main floor. This new area, along with the study area to the right of the main entrance, will be reserved for health sciences students, and accessible using your Pitt ID as a swipe card. Continue reading

search.DataJournals: a Tool to Discover Data Published within Data Journals

Data journals are a means to share datasets and communicate detailed information about the methods and instrumentation used to acquire the data.

However, locating datasets shared via these publications can be challenging, as PubMed includes very few data journals and does not provide full-text searching to easily locate information not found in the title or abstract of an article. To facilitate this discovery, HSLS created a federated search portal named search.DataJournals, which searches the full text of four open access data journals: Data in Brief, Genomics Data, GigaScience, and Scientific Data.

A query will search across all fields of the data article including data description, materials, methods, instrumentation, data source location, and data accessibility. Search results are aggregated and ordered by relevance and can be filtered by clustered topical categories that are created on the fly based on the textual information of the retrieved records.

Contact HSLS Data Services if you have questions about using this tool, locating datasets, or sharing data.

~Melissa Ratajeski

Liaison Librarians Support Your Research and Scholarship

Faculty librarians are integrated as liaisons into undergraduate and graduate programs in the six schools of the health sciences, as well as other health sciences research and clinical departments throughout the university. Liaison librarians are subject specialists who provide support for research and scholarship in many ways, such as by:

  • Participating on curriculum committees
  • Designing course-integrated instructional sessions that teach research skills specific to a course or an assignment
  • Customizing classes or presentations on timely, relevant topics such as data management or scholarly communication
  • Collaborating on research projects
  • Participating on systematic review teams and grant projects

Patricia Weiss (left), Research and Instruction Librarian, has joined Barbara Folb (right), Public Health Informationist, as HSLS co-liaison to the Graduate School of Public Health.

For more information, please contact your liaison librarian.

~Renae Barger