We’ve built a research guide to help you learn more. This guide includes information about what sex and gender differences research is, funding resources and information on women’s health.

Find it here: http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/sexandgender

Please contact Amy Honisett at amy.honisett@utah.edu or 801-587-9246 with questions or comments.

Two options for University of Utah users listed below:

1. Sign in to NCBI via library’s EZproxy at https://ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/login?url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/account/signin/ — bookmark this!
2. Or use two browsers or two tabs:
   1. Open PubMed first, sign in to NCBI
   2. then Open new tab or browser and log in via “off-campus access” button from the library homepage.

“Cases Database adds value to individual reports, allowing comparison of similar cases and helping to highlight trends and patterns which may help researchers to develop hypotheses which can then be tested by systematic research.
To aid discovery, all cases reports in Case Database are annotated using text-mining, which extracts clinically relevant information such as age, sex, ethnicity, symptom, intervention or medication using standard controlled vocabularies.”

- from BioMed Central Press Release.

Read more at BMC Blog.

Find Cases Database at http://www.casesdatabase.com/

UpToDate is now available both on and off campus.  Health practitioners are encouraged to register to gain continuing education (CME/CE/CPD ) credit and other benefits. However, users can skip registration and use UpToDate anonymously.

NOTE:  uptodate.com/online continues to work from devices connected to the university network and  does not prompt for user registration.

NOTE to Mobile Users: the UpToDate app does not work with our institutional license. When possible, use your mobile browser to access UpToDate.

NIH news release.

When viewing the “abstract” display from the library’s link to PubMed, you will see our new icons for either online fulltext, “Eccles Online” or the physical print volume, “Eccles Print” which is available in the physical journal collection, located lower level of the library.

Note: When off campus, University of Utah affiliates still need to connect to the campus network first.

• Picking the right search terms
• Understanding search results
• Narrowing a search to get the best results
• Searching for evidence for research tasks
• Evaluating credibility of sources

This video includes two librarians talking briefly about the transformation of their jobs, and the importance of overcoming the digital divide: those who can versus those who cannot search effectively.

While these lessons are aimed at primary and secondary school students, Google’s Search Education could also be incorporated in to college freshmen level courses, especially those that everyone is required to take.

Pros and cons

On the positive side, this package of lesson plans could be incorporated into any school’s curriculum, perhaps with testing to assure students are reaching certain levels of proficiency. If students moving from one level of education to another (primary to secondary to higher ed) bring sufficient levels of search proficiency, this provides opportunities for them to take these skills to the next level, creating and contributing new content. If librarians and other educators embrace this curriculum and can clearly demonstrate its value (grant-funded study, anyone?), it will eventually become required learning.

On the negative side, what if the librarian’s Masters of Library Science degree was replaced with a “Bachelors in Education with Search Certification” degree? If using Google and a few selected credible resources is all that’s needed for primary and secondary education, why would anyone spend the extra time and money to get an MLS? Colleges and universities may still need Information Specialists (i.e. librarians) to teach how to use specialized databases for a time. But what if Google decided to weigh in on the subscription database business, setting up a single standard for organizing data for searching? Google could become a single-point of access to any and all publishers’ content. This could make or break a publisher or other content provider. While major vendors such as EBSCO and LexisNexis could find the resources to adapt, smaller publishers could be pushed aside, and ultimately be absorbed by their larger competitors.

Could this happen? Why or why not? Tell us (in the comments)!

Watch the YouTube video or read the NLM Technical Bulletin to learn more.

Want help using the new interface? Please do Ask Us.

Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com are by and large effective search engines for helping lay users get health and medical information. Nevertheless, the current ranking methods have some pitfalls and there is room for improvement to help users get more accurate and useful information. We suggest that search engine users explore multiple search engines to search different types of health information and medical knowledge for their own needs and get a professional consultation if necessary.

Researchers searched for “breast cancer” using the four top search engines, combined the top 200 non-redundant results from each source into a list, and then gave that list to eight volunteers to evaluate, scoring there relevance to research on a scale of 0-10 (low to high). Volunteers were all highly educated, most of them with backgrounds in science. They were provided with six “gold standard” sites for information on this topic to compare against before making their determination:

1. U.S. National Cancer Institute
2. American Cancer Society
3. Mayo Clinic
4. MedicineNet
5. Wikipedia
6. Susan G. Komen for the Cure

The volunteers tended to score the popular science and personal websites the highest overall, while scoring corporation and advertising websites the lowest. Researchers conclude that search engines do provide good information overall, though their sample is small, both in number of participants and topics searched.

This study has a number of serious flaws in it, and begs the question: is a little bit of mediocre research better than no research at all? First, the high education levels of the volunteer evaluators, plus their choices to score popular science websites above commercial websites indicate high levels of information literacy. Yet other research shows that over 90 million adults in the U.S. (36% of the population) have poor health literacy. How would people like this evaluate and select the right sources using a search engine? As any librarian watching patrons search will tell you, most people never look beyond the first three search results, let alone the first page of results. And search engines like Google employ algorithms to customize search results based on your previous searches, which may or may not give you the best resources.

Next, the researchers note the shortcomings of search engines in “ranking the websites according to their usefulness,” and recommend that “users apply multiple search engines when looking for medical and health information online, instead of using only a single search engine.” As a librarian and past computer consultant, I’ve learned that many people cannot distinguish between “the Internet” and a web browser, let alone utilize and critically evaluate search engines and the search results they generate. Librarians and researchers are the professionals best suited to handle that task.

Finally, while the “gold standard” sites probably contain all the basic information on breast cancer from the view of their medical expert, how readable and understandable is their content across different groups and ability levels? Had the researchers chosen to include a librarian on their team, she or he could have provided important insight and evaluation of these sites in this area. And why was a site like MedicineNet included while MedlinePlus was excluded from the short list? MedlinePlus is advertisement-free, offers information in Spanish and other languages, and is written at a level that can be understood by a wider audience.

While search engines will, generally speaking, help end users find helpful health and medical information, the will inevitably lead some people to inaccurate or misleading information. And with so many people having low information and health literacy skills, it is imperative that they be directed to quality, evidence-based resources for answers to their questions. This study does nothing to assist in that endeavor.

References:

Kutner, M. (2007). Literacy in everyday life: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Wang, L., Wang, J., Wang, M., Li, Y., Liang, Y., & Xu, D. (2012). Using Internet Search Engines to Obtain Medical Information: A Comparative Study. Journal of medical Internet research, 14(3).

• Updated search functionality
• Enhanced access to tools needed to make your research easier – such as Stedman’s Medical Dictionary and MedCalc 3000
• Dynamic ability to quickly download tables, figures and images for presentations
• A powerful search engine that keeps historical track of your research, enabling you to automatically retrieve your “favorites”
• Redesigned layout making it easier to locate resources and find relevant, authoritative, evidence-based information
• Enhanced ease of access to bibliographic citations – such as Refworks and Endnote
• More user preference options that enable enhanced customization

Because this is a subscription-based resource, users need to be affilitates (students, faculty, staff, etc.) of the University of Utah, or access it from an on-campus computer.

Try it here, and tell us what you think!

Specific improvements include:

• A revamped homepage, which offers better navigation through the site as well as direct access to resources such as the Users’ Guide and NIH Public Access information
• Redesigned Advanced Search and Limits pages
• An updated search results format
• Direct access to images in PMC articles
• A new organization and updated appearance for PMC’s informational pages, including drop-down menus for navigation links

A tour complete with screenshots is available in the latest bulletin.

Class: BLAST: The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool
Date: Friday, July 15, 2011
Time: 10:00-11:00 a.m.
Place: HSEB 3100 B
Description: The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between protein or nucleotide sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence in a database and calculates the statistical significance of the matches. This class provides an introduction to BLAST and then describes the practical application of different BLAST program.

Class: Genomes Updates
Date: Monday, July 18, 2011
Time: 11:00 a.m.-Noon
Place: HSEB 3100 B
Description: Contains sequence and map data from the whole genomes of over 1000 organisms. The genomes represent both completely sequenced organisms and those for which sequencing is in progress.

For more information contact Jeanne Le Ber; 801-585-6744

As an alternative, use WorldCat to find items in libraries near you. Please contact us with questions or concerns.

PART ONE: Introduces users to the Environmental Health and Toxicology Portal and covers the basics of searching the TOXNET system, including saving, printing and downloading citations. The databases covered in this session address factual and bibliographic information about chemicals and toxicology. (Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 10:00-Noon)

PART TWO: Continues the exploration of the portal by introducing resources that can be used to learn about environmental exposure, map environmental release data, and find drug and dietary supplement information. (Friday, June 3, 2011 at 10:00-11:30 a.m.)

For more information contact Jeanne Le Ber; 801-585-6744

With this new search and discovery tool, you will be able to search all University of Utah Libraries:
•  J. Willard Marriott Library
•  S. J. Quinney Law Library
•  Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library
•  Emma Ray Riggs McKay Music Library
•  Harold and Kaye Dunn Orthopaedic Library
•  Hope Fox Eccles Clinical Library
•  John and Toni Bloomberg Ophthalmology Library

Features include:
•  Find books, journals, digital content and more using one search interface
•  Access e-books and e-journals with one click
•  Save items in a personal e-Shelf or export them to EndNote
•  Narrow your results by availability, collection, resource type, topic, publication date, language, author, and classification
•  Get suggestions for different searches or strategies if you don’t find what you need
•  Use Google/Amazon-like features including: Did You Mean? (Spell-Check), Find More Like This, & Book Covers

What will you discover?

PMC Canada is the result of a three-way collaborative effort by the National Library of Medicine®, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). Similar to United Kingdom PubMed Central, PMC Canada will include most of the health and life sciences literature available through the United States PMC. PMC Canada will also include research resulting from funding through the CIHR.

And as of April 28, 2010, they have added a manuscript submission system which supports the Canadian Institutes of Health Research system’s “Policy on Access to Research Outputs, which requires CIHR grant recipients to make their peer-reviewed publications freely accessible online within six months of publication.” PubMed Central Canada is available in both English and French.