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Whole Genome Sequences from a Diverse Human Population Now Available Through the All of Us Research Hub

In March 2022, the All of Us Research Program announced the release of its initial genomic dataset: nearly 100,000 whole genome sequences and 165,000 genotyping arrays, with nearly 50% coming from people who self-identify with a racial or ethnic minority group.

In an announcement about the release of the genomic data, Kelsey Mayo, Ph.D., scientific portfolio and product manager at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Data and Research Center, states:

“What’s going to grab researchers’ attention is the diversity of the cohort. Half of our cohort is non-European. More than 90% of participants in genome-wide association studies have been of European descent. There’s just a real absence of genetic data from African, Asian, and Latino people. All of Us participants are providing this important data that’s been missing in health research. So we are going to have that new genetic information that’s been missing.”

Plans for forthcoming releases include data from participants who self-identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, with resources to provide important context for researchers.

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New Bates’ Visual Guide Videos on Streaming Media

Sample Communication & Interpersonal Skills Video thumbnailThe popular online streaming media resource Bates’ Visual Guide to Physical Examination has a new series of “Communication and Interpersonal Skills” videos available on the HSLS Streaming Media page. The 27 recently added videos concentrate on the fundamental interpersonal and communication techniques often demonstrated in clinical encounters, such as appropriate nonverbal communication, broaching sensitive topics, and interprofessional communication. Some of the videos address topics relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as “Use of Preferred Title, Name, and Gender Pronoun” and  “Rapport: Patients with Physical and Sensory Disabilities.”

In addition to these videos, HSLS provides access to two additional series of Bates’ Visual Guide videos, “Physical Examination” and “OSCE Clinical Skills.” The physical examination videos focus on clinical accuracy and patient care with topics such as “Head-to-Toe Assessment: Adult” and “Head-to-Toe Assessment: Child.” The OSCE clinical skills videos, with topics such as “Shortness of Breath” and “Memory Loss,” provide examples of new patient encounters, to help viewers practice their clinical reasoning skills.

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Featured Workshop: Find and Get the Research Funding You Need

HSLS offers classes in a wide array of subjects—instructional and visual design, molecular biology, literature searching, and more! You can quickly view all upcoming classes and events or sign up to receive the weekly “Upcoming HSLS Classes and Workshops” email.

Featured workshop of the month: Find and Get the Research Funding You Need

Tuesday, June 14, 2022, 10-11 a.m.

Register for this virtual workshop*

Applying for grants and securing research funding plays a crucial role in the research process, as it can help advance the successful execution of the research project. However, knowing where to start can be intimidating due to the variety of funders (federal, state, non-profit, etc.), types of awards (grants, scholarships, etc.), recipient requirements (early-career researcher, doctoral student, institutional, etc.), and other factors. While there is plenty of online information regarding this topic, searching the internet can cause information overload or provide misleading advice. The key to getting funding is not simply finding an award and applying for it, but applying to the right funder for the appropriate type of award.

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MLA ‘22 Annual Meeting Participation

The Medical Library Association held its Annual Meeting, MLA ’22, both virtually and in person in New Orleans, Louisiana, May 3-6, 2022. Congratulations to those from HSLS who participated in and contributed to the meeting:

MLA ’22 New Orleans, May 3-6 2022, #MLANET22, mlanet.org, “Reconnect, Renew, Reflect”Lightning Talk

Stephen Gabrielson, Scholarly Communication Librarian, presented “More than Manuscripts: Redesigning a Scholarly Communication Guide to Include Multiple Research Outputs.” Co-authors were Carrie Iwema, former Coordinator of Basic Science Services, Melissa Ratajeski, Assistant Director for Data and Publishing Services, Helenmary Sheridan, Data Services Librarian, and Francesca Yates, Research and Instruction Librarian.

Presentations

Kirsten Crowhurst, TEC Program Innovation Strategist, Michael Balkenhol, NNLM All of Us Community Engagement Coordinator, and Tess Wilson, TEC Program Manager, were co-authors of the presentation “Citizen/Community Science & Crowdsourcing with the National Library of Medicine,” presented by Yamila M. El-Khayat, AZ Health Sciences Library. Other co-authors were Nancy Shin, Network of the National Library of Medicine Region 5, Stefania Acosta Ramirez, University of Iowa, Darlene Cavalier, SciStarter and Arizona State University, and Caroline Nickerson, SciStarter.

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Film and Slide Scanners Available to Borrow from Falk Library

Though we’re now accustomed to using digital cameras and computer-based PowerPoints in our daily lives, in the not-too-distant past, these technologies relied on tangible media and analog processes. The first mainstream digital camera only came onto the market in 1994; before then, physical film and slides were needed to capture and present images. Given their recent popularity, you’ve probably stumbled across film or slides in a forgotten filing cabinet or overflowing closet at some point. If you’re inclined to clean out this storage space and bring these images into the 21st century, HSLS now has two scanners available to help you with the digitization process.

The Kodak Mini Digital Film Scanner is a beginner-friendly, versatile scanner that scans images directly onto an SD card. Simply insert your film strip or slide into the provided adapter, load it into the scanner, and scan your image with the press of a button. If you’re not satisfied with your digitized image, you can adjust the brightness, coloration, and resolution at which you’re scanning. When you’re done scanning, remember to transfer your images from the provided SD card onto your own external storage device or computer before returning the equipment to Falk Library.

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HSLS Staff News

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

News

Congratulations to Anthony Harris, LMS Instructional Technologist for the NNLM All of Us Program Center, on earning his Master of Science in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information.

Congratulations to Marissa Spade, Marketing and Web Specialist, on earning a graduate certificate in Marketing Analytics from Pennsylvania State University.

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Skin of Color Representation in eBooks

Jordan Lamb, a medical student in the Clinical Scientist Training Program at Pitt Med, worked with HSLS librarians to locate and purchase several dermatology eBooks featuring skin of color, following a curriculum audit at the School of Medicine. After reviewing the lecture slides presented in Pitt Med’s first- and second-year classes, she found that “the majority of images in all courses, not just for dermatology, were of white skin.” Presentation of skin conditions (for example, psoriasis) can differ significantly on white skin (typically red patches) and on brown or black skin (typically purple patches). Lamb explained, “A lack of representation of all skin colors leads to a knowledge gap for students. Physicians are also less confident with diagnosing skin disease presenting on brown or black skin.”

A goal of her research project is to provide resources to instructors at the School of Medicine that can be used to increase the diversity of skin color representation in the curriculum. In studies like “Representations of Race and Skin Tone in Medical Textbook Imagery,” analysis shows that most of the images in “mainstream” dermatology and medical school textbooks are of white skin. However, the skin of color textbooks identified by Lamb expertly display skin conditions on brown and black skin. Lamb’s Visual Learning Equity: Resource Guide shares access information for HSLS eBooks as well as other free galleries of images on publicly available websites. Two examples of eBooks accessible at Pitt are “Taylor and Kelly’s Dermatology for Skin of Color” and “Atlas of Black Skin.”

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What’s New with Zotero?

In March, the free citation manager Zotero released its latest update—Zotero 6. If you are new to Zotero, then this is the version you will download from Zotero.org; if you already have Zotero on your computer, you will want to update it soon. Simply open Zotero on your desktop, and then go to “Edit” – “Check for Updates…” and follow the on-screen instructions to update to Zotero 6. Once you have updated to Zotero 6, you will also need to reinstall the Microsoft Word add-in. This can be done by opening Zotero again, going to “Edit” – “Preferences” – “Cite” – “Word Processors,” and then clicking on “Reinstall Microsoft Word Add-in.”

The largest change from previous versions of Zotero is the addition of a built-in PDF reader. Users will now be able to read and annotate PDFs without leaving Zotero. For more information on the update, check out the Zotero blog or view the complete changelog to see everything that is different between Zotero 5 and Zotero 6.

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Featured Workshop: Introduction to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

HSLS offers classes in a wide array of subjects—instructional and visual design, molecular biology, literature searching, and more! You can quickly view all upcoming classes and events or sign up to receive the weekly upcoming HSLS classes and workshops email.

Featured workshop of the month: Introduction to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

Monday, May 16, 2022, 2-3 p.m.

Register for this virtual workshop*

Photoshop and Illustrator are premier programs for editing images and are widely used across many industries and disciplines. Although other software programs are available for figure creation and research-specific image projects, Photoshop and Illustrator provide many helpful and unique functions for use in the health sciences. Eligible students and faculty may also qualify for Pitt IT-provided Adobe Creative Cloud access.

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PubMed Central’s New Website Design

If you have used PubMed Central (PMC) recently, you might have noticed that it looks a bit different. In March 2022, PMC launched a new, modernized version of their website. This update was to improve navigation and article viewing and to provide consistency between features in PMC and PubMed.

PubMed Central is an archive of freely available biomedical and life sciences journal articles. It contains full-text manuscripts deposited by authors as part of their compliance with NIH or other institutions’ public access policies, as well as journal articles deposited directly by publishers.

When you view an article in PMC, you can now quickly see what other articles in PMC are citing it, link to data availability statements or supplementary materials associated with the article, and find similar articles in PubMed. Additional tools allow you to easily generate a formatted citation of the article, share a link to it on social media, or save it to your Favorites collection in My NCBI. Additional information on these and other new features can be found in the PMC User Guide and the Quick Guide to Updated Article View. Continue reading

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Treasures from the Rare Book Room: Willis and His Seminal Works

Thomas Willis (1621-1675) was a successful English physician, professor of natural sciences at Oxford, and a founding member of the Royal Society. He was an example of a physician who, instead of embracing classical authority, chose to study things based on direct observations. He was also the first to argue that research into the anatomy of the brain was the necessary foundation to speculations about the mind. Falk Library owns his work “Opera Omnia,” published in 1682 in Amsterdam by Henricus Wetstein.

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HSLS Staff News

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

Presentations

Kelsey Cowles, Research and Instruction Librarian, presented Citizen Science: Transforming Scientific Research Through Public Participation. April 1, 2022. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Year of Data & Society invited lecture.

Publications

Ansuman Chattopadhyay, Program Director for Molecular Biology Information Services, co-authored the article:

Ferrari R, Cong G, Chattopadhyay A, Xie B, Assaf E, Morder K, Calderon MJ, Watkins SC, Sachdev U. Attenuated cell-cycle division protein 2 and elevated mitotic roles of polo-like kinase 1 characterize deficient myoblast fusion in peripheral arterial disease. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2022 Apr 3;609:163-168. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2022.03.161. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35436627.

Michele Klein Fedyshin, Research and Clinical Instruction Librarian, was acknowledged for substantive literature searches supporting the book chapter:

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). “Bipolar and Related Disorders.” In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). https://doi-org.pitt.idm.oclc.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787.

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Citizen Science: A Tool for Teaching, Learning, and Contributing in the Health Sciences

April is Citizen Science Month, so there’s no better time to consider incorporating citizen science into the classroom or into your free time. Citizen science refers to scientific research that leverages the collective strength of communities and the public to identify research questions, collect and analyze data, interpret results, make new discoveries, and/or develop technologies and applications. Today’s thriving citizen science movement has evolved over centuries as a mutually beneficial solution to both researchers’ needs for greater data-collection and analysis capacity and communities’ desire to be empowered as active participants in research that affects them.

Projects that ask everyday people to go outside and count birds, identify plants, or report air pollution often serve as the face of citizen science, as they are widely appealing and easy to participate in. However, citizen science projects can be found in almost any area of inquiry, ranging from history to astronomy. In fact, citizen health science is increasingly making its mark on biomedical research! We’re exploring this topic in the HSLS class, Citizen Health Science: A Tool for Teaching, Learning, and Contributing, on April 20 at 2 p.m.

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New NIH Website for Scientific Data Sharing

After a long development process, the NIH’s new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy will go into effect on January 25, 2023. The key feature of the new policy is that all researchers applying to the NIH for funding will be required to submit a Data Management and Sharing Plan (or DMSP) with their funding proposal; previously, many centers and funding opportunities had required a similar data management plan, but the requirement was not universal. The new policy does not require that researchers share their data (either with other researchers or with the public) but does convey “an expectation that researchers will maximize appropriate data sharing when developing plans.”

With January 2023 fast approaching, many have asked for more specific guidance from the NIH. The NIH has recently launched the Scientific Data Sharing website with helpful notices that expand the DMS Policy, such as:

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