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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 Outdated themes and fonts, outlandish colors, and overcrowded slides can distract your audience from retaining the information that is being shared.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 →

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Explore DOIs and Beyond at PIDapalooza—the Global Festival of Persistent Identifiers for Digital Objects

Take a moment and consider your name. Do you have a name so unique that you are the only person with that name publishing in your field? I do—there are very few Helenmarys in the world to begin with. But if you cut my first name down to “Helen,” suddenly I could be one of a dozen authors working in my area. Reduce it further to “H,” and I’ve vanished among the crowd. Uniqueness is no match for the sheer ubiquity of names in the online scholarly publishing record.

What I need is a PID: a persistent identifier that refers to me and only me, and would still refer to me if I changed my name. For names, that’s easy: I have an ORCID iD, a sixteen-digit alphanumeric string that I can connect to my research output and take with me wherever I go. But what if I were not a person but a dataset, an article, or a piece of software? All of those can get PIDs too, as can far stranger objects, the breadth of which was the focus of January’s all-online, still-available, free PIDapalooza festival. Continue reading →

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HSLS Adds New E-books to Digital Collection

Book cover with title The Social Medicine Reader, Volume 1, 3rd Edition, Ethics and Cultures of BiomedicineHSLS has a vast collection of electronic resources such as e-journals, databases, and even e-books. The HSLS Health Sciences E-Books page has a subject listing of the many e-books available to our users.

Two new volumes of the e-book, The Social Medicine Reader, have recently been added to our digital collection. This revised 3rd edition features commentaries by practicing physicians and moving narratives of challenges that health care providers face every day. This edition is authored by scholars across the fields of medicine, social sciences, and humanities.

Access to electronic resources is restricted to authorized University of Pittsburgh and UPMC-affiliated users unless otherwise specified. If you are affiliated with Pitt, always start your e-book or e-journal search from the HSLS web site, which will use your Pitt credentials to provide you access to full e-books or full-text e-journal articles while working remotely.

Continue reading →

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Accessible Zoom Classes and Meetings

Over the past year, HSLS has been overhauling its digital instructional materials to comply with the accessibility standards established in Pitt’s new EIT Policy. This focus on universal design has resulted in changes large and small, most noticeably in improvements made to instructional materials for end-users. Beyond highly evident developments like accessibly formatted class files and captioned videos, the EIT Policy has also impacted how HSLS instructors approach teaching and course design behind the scenes.

Like most of the University, HSLS classes have been hosted via Zoom since March 2020. As part of our accessibility efforts, HSLS instructors have adapted the remote environment to ensure that all virtual learners can attend and participate in HSLS classes. At your next Zoom meeting, try implementing the following practices used by HSLS instructors to create an inclusive learning environment. Continue reading →

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Featured Workshop: Getting Systematic About Systematic Reviews

Getting Systematic About Systematic Reviews provides a glimpse into the planning process and methods required to produce a high-quality systematic review. This class is ideal for researchers, clinicians, or individuals within the health sciences who would like to learn more about this type of scientific investigation.

Systematic reviews use rigorous and transparent methods to synthesize the findings of research studies and are an increasingly popular study methodology. While they may sound like an easy alternative to a traditional literature review, systematic reviews require careful planning, the creation of complex search strings for use in bibliographic databases, thorough documentation of all records and articles used in the review process, and a significant time commitment from all research team members. Continue reading →

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Uninterrupted Access to Journal Articles via SeamlessAccess

SeamlessAccess is a service designed to foster a more streamlined online access experience when using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. This service offers HSLS users convenient access to selected licensed resources with just one click. Currently, SeamlessAccess partners with Elsevier ScienceDirect, Nature, American Chemical Society, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis to allow for one-click access via their platforms. This list will continue to grow in 2021 as Elsevier plans to add SeamlessAccess to its other products.

According to a recent webinar, SeamlessAccess users number in the hundreds of thousands, and it’s easy to see why. Between the amount of users working from home right now, and the benefits this service provides, it is a handy tool for remote users. Pitt users can take advantage of SeamlessAccess for articles on participating publishers’ platforms that are licensed by HSLS. Researchers will now see the SeamlessAccess “Access through your institution” button clearly marked on ScienceDirect article pages, as well as articles from Nature, and the other publishers mentioned above. By clicking on “Access through your institution,” you will be directed to Pitt Passport to sign in, and then taken back to the publisher’s page. If HSLS doesn’t have a subscription to a particular journal, you may request a copy free of charge from our Document Delivery Service. Continue reading →

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Treasures from the Rare Book Room: Erik H. Erikson’s Manuscript

Historical manuscripts hand-copied by scribes largely disappeared after the invention of the printing press. With the advent of typewriters and computers, modern handwritten texts are also scarce and soon might disappear altogether. Today’s text editors do not offer the same opportunity to study penmanship, deletions, and notations to glimpse a writer’s personality and writing process. Falk Library’s small manuscript collection aims to preserve some handwritten resources to give researchers another angle from which to study the past.

Erik Homberger Erikson (1902-1994), a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, is famous for his theory of the stages of psychosocial development, and for coining the term “identity crisis.” He never received a formal degree in medicine, but instead studied art, traveled widely in Europe in order to “find himself,” and studied psychoanalysis with Anna Freud in Vienna. He moved to the United States in 1933 and began working as a child psychoanalyst. He held various teaching positions at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley. While working at the Austen Riggs Center in the 1950s, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh. 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

Erin Seger, Health Professions Coordinator, NNLM Middle Atlantic Region, was awarded certification as a Master Certified Health Education Specialist through the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing in January 2021.

Publications

Michele Klein-Fedyshin, Research and Clinical Instruction Librarian:

Continue reading →

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Celebrating Love Data Week 2021

Love Data Week is February 8-12, 2021. #LoveDataPghThe week of February 8-12, 2021, is Love Data Week, an international event designed to raise awareness about research data management, sharing, preservation, and—most importantly—how we can help you. To celebrate, HSLS Data Services will be hosting a variety of workshops and giveaways, and engaging with the community via social media.

Workshops

The HSLS classes offered during Love Data Week (online synchronous via Zoom) are listed below. Every class attendee will be entered into a raffle for a chance to win a gift card (mailed to winner). The more classes you attend, the more chances you have.

Note: Zoom links will be sent upon registration (also available at the above class links). Continue reading →

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Systematically Evaluate the Research Literature with Critical Appraisal Tools

The January 2020 HSLS Update article, Write Better and Get Published: Health Research Reporting Guidelines, discussed health research reporting guidelines (RGs) which addressed the importance of clear and transparent writing. This article focuses on the importance of critical appraisal (CA) of study execution (also called study conduct) and provides tools to aid in the CA process as well as suggestions for settings to conduct critical appraisal.

Why critical appraisal? Simply put, critical appraisal of studies is key to the incorporation of quality research into evidence-based practice. Not all research is good; critical appraisal offers a reliable method of objectively identifying what is good about a study and what is not. It is a systematic method for reviewing study execution based on a validated checklist of items. Rather than relying on the reader to notice inconsistencies or incorrect analyses (i.e. making notes in the margin), a critical appraisal ensures that the appropriate questions are asked during each phase of the study from rationale to study method choice to discussion. Continue reading →

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Explore Human Gene/Disease Data with HGMD

  • Do you need to verify that an observed mutation is associated with a particular human inherited disease?
  • Are you researching a specific gene or disease and want to know its pathogenic mutational spectrum?
  • Do you want reliable and frequently updated mutation data in order to perform thorough variant annotation?

The Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD) is the long-lived gold standard resource for human hereditary disease mutation data. HSLS MolBio has provided limited access to HGMD Professional for many years (the Products Overview table shows the differences between the public and pro versions). Thanks to funding support from the Institute for Precision Medicine, we are pleased to announce an expansion of our licensing agreement with QIAGEN so that more Pitt researchers are able to use this comprehensive tool simultaneously. If you are a bioinformatician, clinical geneticist, diagnostician, or genetic counselor and are not already familiar with HGMD, now is the time to explore it! Register for access via the HSLS site license. Continue reading →

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Featured Workshop: Mapping Geographic Data with Tableau

Mapping Geographic Data with TableauWoman hands typing on laptop in blurred office with double exposure of world map and graphs. is a new hands-on workshop that introduces mapping and analyzing geographic data using Tableau. Recognized as the “world’s leading analytics platform,” Tableau is a data visualization software that allows users to explore and analyze data in seconds while reshaping the way we use and understand data. With a focus on data visualization, this workshop is ideal for anyone who needs to visualize data geographically or show how data elements are spatially distributed. Tableau is not a replacement for a GIS-focused application, but for anyone who has one data layer associated with location information, it can allow you to create some engaging visualizations. This workshop demonstrates how Tableau can take location data and any other joined data and plot it on a map. Options for customizing your visualization, grouping data, adding filters, and sharing your visualizations will also be discussed. Continue reading →