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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 →

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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 →