Pitt Resources for Bioinformatics Data Analysis: The Four ‘C’s

Does your research involve identifying correlations between gene sequences and diseases, predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, transcriptomics, metabolomics, or any of the many other ‘omics? If so, then you have a lot of data that requires analysis: a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making.

The “four ‘C’s” is shorthand to describe broad categories of options for analyzing bioinformatics data, including paying someone else to do it (Core labs), working with another researcher (Collaboration), and doing it yourself either by learning to program (Coding) or using out-of-the-box software (Commercially-licensed tools). The University of Pittsburgh provides numerous options in these four categories to help you with your data analysis needs.

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Featured Workshop: Identifying and Combating Health Misinformation

HSLS offers classes in a wide array of subjects—citation management, 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.

Featured workshop of the month: Identifying and Combating Health Misinformation

Wednesday, March 16 from 11 a.m. to noon.

Register for this virtual workshop*

“Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health. It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.” –Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General

Most health professionals are keenly aware of the scale of the global health misinformation problem. The anti-vaccination movement is a prime example of the potential power that health misinformation has to convince huge numbers of people and sway health outcomes at a population level. This is far from the only such example. Prolific misinformation about almost any health topic can easily be found online, and the worst misinformation can be both highly convincing and extremely dangerous.

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Honoring the Life and Legacy of Nancy Tannery

Headshot of Nancy TanneryA new philanthropic opportunity is available in honor of Nancy Hrinya Tannery, former HSLS Senior Associate Director and University of Pittsburgh Assistant Provost. The Nancy Tannery Memorial Fund allows colleagues, friends, and family to contribute to memorializing her legacy at Falk Library.

Nancy had a long history of service to the University and to the profession of health sciences librarianship. After a 20-year research career, Nancy joined Falk Library as a reference librarian and advanced to multiple HSLS leadership positions. Nancy left HSLS in 2017 to serve as Assistant Provost and retired from the University in 2020 with emerita status. As HSLS Senior Associate Director, Nancy played a key role in implementing the HSLS strategic vision, along with responsibilities in planning, assessment and innovation, and oversight of instructional programs and reference services.

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Learn EndNote on Your Schedule

EndNote is a popular citation manager that is free for Pitt faculty and students to download. Though HSLS offers several virtual workshops on EndNote every semester, conflicts in your schedule may prevent you from attending these real-time classes. Classes also might not move at the pace you would prefer. To help address these issues, HSLS now provides a set of three interactive online tutorials for EndNote to help you get started with this citation manager whenever you want, at your own pace.

The tutorials are designed for you to follow along with instructions, completing tasks in EndNote as you go. The tutorials feature EndNote 20, which you can download through Pitt’s software download service.

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Celebrating the Career of HSLS Librarian Jill Foust

Headshot of Jill FoustJill Foust, Research and Instruction Librarian, retired on March 1, marking the end of her 33-year career at Pitt. Foust has been a long-time editor of the HSLS Update newsletter, delivering articles about the library to thousands of readers over the past two decades.

In addition to her career as a Pitt librarian, Jill is also an alumna of Pitt’s library science graduate program. After applying to the master’s program, she received a fellowship opportunity through the H.W. Wilson Foundation, which fully supported the pursuit of her degree. After graduation, she spent six years in New York City in corporate libraries, where she gathered information and conducted research supporting the banking and insurance industries.

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Treasures from the Rare Book Room: Advice from a Quack or a Naturopath?

Random reflections on indigestion, bilious complaints, scrofula… by S. W. Tilke. London 1837.

This curious book is part of our gout collection, which has a few rare items. This book by Tilke, like others in the collection, is also scarce – few copies are known to be in existence. Scarce books typically were published in limited numbers, were so popular that they were read to death, or were too trivial to make it into a library collection. The scarcity of Tilke’s book may be linked to all three reasons. It was written by a self-professed expert, a baker-turned-healer, Samuel Westcott Tilke. Tilke, the owner of an establishment offering medical advice, remedies, and stay-in-clinic treatments, wrote a self-promoting work. It advertised his services, pills, medical preparations, and two products he invented: the Improved Enema Instrument and the Camphorated Spirit Bed Lamp. The language is suitable for the general public, and at one time was annotated with the handwritten notes of a studious reader. This suggests that the book gained some popularity. The presence of multiple underlined passages, marginal notes, and several additions prove that the book was studied with interest.

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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

Francesca Yates, Research and Instruction Librarian, served as chair of the Member Arrangements and Networking Subcommittee and was a member of the 2021 MAC Annual Planning Committee, for the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Medical Library Association.

Publications

Michele Klein-Fedyshin, Research and Clinical Instruction Librarian, was acknowledged for her search in the article:

Herbstsomer RA, Stahl ST. Cross-Cultural Experiences of Hospice and Palliative Care Services: A Thematic Analysis. Omega (Westport). 2021 Dec;84(2):551-566. doi: 10.1177/0030222820904205. Epub 2020 Feb 20. PMID: 32077377. Continue reading