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Important Changes Coming Soon to the Way You Log in to NCBI Accounts

Did you know that your PubMed searches and auto alerts are saved in My NCBI through an NCBI account? You may also be using your NCBI account to access SciENcv and My Bibliography. Significant changes are coming very soon to NCBI accounts. After June 1, 2021, you will no longer be able to use your NCBI account to log in and no new NCBI direct logins can be created. Why the changes? NCBI is transitioning to third-party logins that have the highest level of security.

What are your options?

If you are affiliated with Pitt and currently have an NCBI account, you can continue to use your account, but you’ll need to add Pitt as your third-party login. Here are the step-by-step instructions: Continue reading →

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Creating Accessible Panopto Videos

To comply with Pitt’s new EIT Accessibility Policy, HSLS strives to create digital instructional materials that are accessible to all users. As part of this effort, HSLS instructors have adapted their methods when teaching via Zoom to ensure that all virtual learners can attend and participate in live HSLS classes. HSLS has also made accessibility improvements to recorded instructional videos hosted on Panopto (also known as Pitt Video/Lecture Capture). If you create and share Panopto videos, try implementing the following practices used by HSLS to create a more inclusive learning environment:

  • Ensure the video is properly captioned. Closed captions make your video accessible to the hearing-impaired community and can also improve the viewing experience for all users.
  • Any PDFs that you include in your video stream should be formatted as fully accessible files. You should also verbally introduce the PDF so that visually impaired users know that the file is available.

Continue reading →

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One-Click Access to PDF from PittCat

The new version of PittCat is a collaboration between HSLS, the University Library System, and Barco Law Library.

PittCat search results for individual articles now include links to offer quick access to popular ways to access articles.

PittCat users can click links below an article of interest to download article PDF, view issue contents, or read online.
Article titled, “Clinical and virological data of the first cases of COVID-19 in Europe: a case series,” as viewed after searching in PittCat.

Below the article citation, you may see a link to directly download article PDFs (“Download Article PDF”), when available, or directly access the HTML article (“Read Article”). Continue reading →

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COVID-19 Vaccine Forums

The Annals of Internal Medicine has produced a series of on-demand Vaccine Forums:

  • Forum 1: “What Physicians and Health Care Professionals Need to Know”—The Science, The Approval Process, The Development of Clinical Guidance, The Political and Public Policy Environment.
  • Forum 2: “Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination”—Effective communication strategies for promoting COVID-19 vaccination confidence and uptake and combating misinformation.
  • Forum 3: “Allocation and Distribution”—Practical information and unique insights and strategies about the allocation and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Forum 4: “Practical Clinical Considerations”—Infectious disease experts discuss the impact of COVID-19 variants on vaccine efficacy, comparative effectiveness of the different vaccines, and post-vaccine behavior recommendations.

Annals also makes available a free collection of COVID-19 content.

*Article derived from Doody’s Core Titles/Doody’s Review Service email communication.

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Treasures from the Rare Book Room: Strong Together—Delpeuch’s History of Gout

Leather bound book titled La goutte & le rheumatism

The first edition of La goutte & le rheumatism (Paris 1900) at Falk Library is a lovely copy in a very attractive leather binding. Its author, Armand Delpeuch (1856-1901) was a physician at the Tenon and Cochin Hospital in Paris. In 1900, he published an article in La Presse Medicale, describing a new sign of aortic insufficiency, a rhythmic bobbing of the head synchronized to a heartbeat. He proposed to call it “De Musset’s sign,” after French writer Alfred de Musset, who displayed the same characteristic head-shaking. The eponym coined by Delpeuch is used to this day. He also published the history of the gout from antiquity to the end of the 17th century. It was the authoritative source on the history of this disease for more than half a century.

Delpeuch’s book is not very old or rare, nor is it a unique copy. What is so special about it then? It is valuable because of the context in which this book exists. It is a part of our Rodnan Collection. Continue reading →

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HSLS Staff News

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

Names in bold are HSLS-affiliated

News

Francesca Yates, Research and Instruction Librarian, completed the MLA Continuing Education course, CAIFL: Critical Appraisal Institute for Librarians, on March 16, 2021, earning 35 MLA CE credits.

Publications

Jill Foust, Research and Instruction Librarian:

Evans MA, Buysse DJ, Marsland AL, Wright AGC, Foust J, Carroll LW, Kohli N, Mehra R, Jasper A, Srinivasan S, Hall MH. Meta-analysis of age and actigraphy assessed sleep characteristics across the lifespan. Sleep. 2021 Apr 5:zsab088. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsab088. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33823052. Continue reading →

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Featured Workshop: Basic EndNote

HSLS offers classes in a wide array of subjects—molecular biology, database searching, bibliographic management, and more! You can quickly view all Upcoming Classes and Events or sign up to receive the weekly Upcoming HSLS Classes and Workshops email.

This month’s featured workshop is Basic EndNote. The workshop will take place on Monday, May 17, from 10-11:30 a.m.

Basic EndNote is a popular workshop at HSLS, as EndNote is a well-known reference management tool that helps to streamline your entire research process. The EndNote software provides assistance in your research practice by allowing you to collect, save, and organize references all in one place for quick and easy access. Then once you’re ready to write, EndNote creates in-text citations and bibliographies for you through a Word plug-in, allowing you to easily switch to different citation styles as needed.

This workshop is ideal for anyone looking for an easier way to manage references and for those tired of creating their bibliographies by hand. Continue reading →

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Evaluating the Openness of a Journal

One of the most notable characteristics of open access journals is that articles are freely available to read. While that is an essential requirement for any open access (OA) journal, there are other facets of OA that should be considered when selecting a journal. By submitting to a journal that follows OA best practices, your work will be more likely to benefit from increased visibility and citations than from less open journals.

If you are unsure about how to get started with evaluating the openness of a journal, check out the HowOpenIsIt? guide. This resource from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) outlines the key elements of open access and shows how each element has varying degrees of openness. These elements include reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability.

Reader rights refer to how quickly your article is available for others to read. Does a journal publish articles as OA immediately, or do their articles exist behind a paywall for an embargo period of six months or longer? Also look into the journal’s policies on Creative Commons licenses to find out how your work can be used and built upon with proper attribution. Continue reading →

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Introducing a New Tool for Single-Cell Gene Expression Analysis

Are you ever in need of easy-to-use, robust tools and algorithms to help analyze, annotate, and identify cell types in your single-cell NGS data? Do you ever want to discover key biomarkers for cell types, tissues, and diseases without the tedious work of curating and analyzing each dataset? Do you ever look for the biological context of specific pathways underlying your single-cell data?

HSLS Molecular Biology Information Service is pleased to announce that we now license three concurrent seats for a new single-cell gene expression analysis module within the long-licensed CLC Genomics Workbench from QIAGEN Digital Insights. It is point-and-click, GUI-based software that does not require programming experience to use. Continue reading →

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HSLS Librarians Participate in Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

When was the last time you used Wikipedia? Considering that Wikipedia is estimated to be the fifth most-used website in the world, there’s a good chance that you’ll find yourself on Wikipedia fairly often. Whether you go there directly or Google something that leads you to a Wikipedia article, there is no denying that there seems to be a Wikipedia article for almost any topic you can imagine. In English-language Wikipedia alone, there are over 50,000 articles on health and medicine topics. Medical professionals, health science students, and the public use Wikipedia to find health information. Wikipedia has been estimated to be the most frequently used health information resource on the web, with more page views than government-run websites such as that of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, as well as privately-owned sites like WebMD.

National Library of Medicine #citeNLM Wikipedia edit-a-thonThe Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) runs campaigns twice a year that encourage people to add citations from National Library of Medicine (NLM) resources—such as PubMed and MedlinePlus—to Wikipedia articles related to a chosen theme. The goal of these campaigns is to improve the amount and quality of health information available on Wikipedia. Continue reading →

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Common Data Elements: Benefits and Feedback Requested

Common Data Elements (CDEs) are definitions that allow data to be consistently captured and recorded across studies. Simply put, they allow researchers to ask the same questions in the same way across studies and receive standardized responses. For example, consider the following two questions about adolescent exercise, used on two different surveys.

Survey 1 Question:

In the past 7 days, how many days did your child exercise so much that he/she breathed hard? (Choose one)

  • No days
  • 1 day
  • 2-3 days
  • 4-5 days
  • 6-7 days

Survey 2 Question:

In the past 7 days, how often did your child exercise or participate in sports activities that made them breathe hard for at least 20 minutes. (Fill in the blank)

  •  __ day/s

The results from each could not be combined, as one question provides options while the other allows write-in responses, and their definition for exercise may vary (as one explicitly states 20 minutes). Continue reading →

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A Rare Look into the Special Collections at HSLS

Readers of the HSLS Update’s Treasures of the Rare Book Room series know about the fascinating stories behind some our oldest and most significant books housed in the HSLS Rare Books and Special Collections. While examining these unique items usually requires an appointment, a new video series invites our readers to a behind-the-scenes look at the collection.

The Medical Treasures virtual series follows curated themes that allow you to explore interesting books and their importance in the field of medicine. Gosia Fort, PhD, who manages the Rare Book and Special Collections, narrates the stories.

Two videos of the series are now viewable on demand:

Continue reading →

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HSLS Staff News

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

Names in bold are HSLS-affiliated

News

Barbara Epstein, HSLS Director, has been awarded MLA’s “Carla J. Funk Governmental Relations Award” in recognition of leadership in governmental relations through service on the Joint Legislative Task Force of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries and the Medical Library Association.

Publications

Ansuman Chattopadhyay, Assistant Director for Molecular Biology Information Services:

Ardila DC, Aggarwal V, Singh M, Chattopadhyay A, Chaparala S, Sant S. Identifying Molecular Signatures of Distinct Modes of Collective Migration in Response to the Microenvironment Using Three-Dimensional Breast Cancer Models. Cancers (Basel). 2021;13(6):1429. doi:10.3390/cancers13061429 Continue reading →

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Featured Workshop: Advanced PowerPoint for Presentations

HSLS offers classes in a wide array of subjects—molecular biology, database searching, bibliographic management, and more! You can quickly view all Upcoming Classes and Events or sign up to receive the weekly Upcoming HSLS Classes and Workshops email.

This month’s featured workshop is Advanced PowerPoint for Presentations. The workshop will take place on Friday, April 23, from 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m.

Register for this virtual workshop*

Advanced PowerPoint for Presentations is an adapted hands-on workshop that demonstrates ways to incorporate design, images, videos, and transitions into your PowerPoint presentations. While the universal message you are trying to convey through your presentation is certainly important, the overall design of your presentation is also an instrumental part of keeping your audience engaged throughout the entire presentation. The ultimate goal of your presentation is to captivate your audience and ensure they will benefit from the information they see and hear. If your PowerPoint slides are not designed with the audience in mind, your message may fall flat. Outdated themes and fonts, outlandish colors, and overcrowded slides can distract your audience from retaining the information that is being shared. Continue reading →