QMedCONNECT May 2018: PubMed ELearning Course Launched!

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: May 2018

Dear friends

With great excitement, we'd like to share that our First ELearning Course - "Mastering PubMed" has gone live in the month of May. This was a project that was on our agenda for years. We went through several learnings and failures, but have finally succeeded!

The Course is on the platform of Mediknit - an organization set up and run by Dr Bhaskar Rajkumar from Bengaluru. Mediknit hosts ELearning courses by well known bodies like the Association of Minimal Access Surgeons, Indian Academy of Neurology and more. Mediknit provides the hosting, the ELearning technology and registration support. The content is entirely ours.

The Course has 11 videos that replicate what we teach in live courses. Beyond that, it includes quizzes and assessments, that help a participant learn much more. One needs to complete the course in six weeks. After that, one can view videos for a whole year, and thus have a continuous learning experience.

The ELearning is an answer to all suggestions we have received in the last ten years - some of which are - The course should be spread out a bit more, We should have repeat sessions, We need more mentoring after the course... and most importantly - "This should be part of the curriculum"! We too believe it should be part of the curriculum. Till the boards decide to do this, we request that everyone reading this, spreads the word amongst institutions to let them know about the availability of this course and get all their students and staff to learn! This is indeed the starting point of any good research.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Interesting Reading

Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations

Gasparyan AY, Nurmashev B, Yessirkepov M, Endovitskiy DA, Voronov AA, Kitas GD. Researcher and author profiles: opportunities, advantages, and limitations. Journal of Korean medical science. 2017 Nov 1;32(11):1749-56

Contemporary research practice requires regular evaluations of research performance. Gasparyan et al. in their article Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations write about the websites that now exist to help the research community access pertinent, reliable and updated information.

You will read about a number of such platforms that exist- and it will help solve a confusion you may have as to which website is the best source of information for your area of interest. For instance, the functionality, scope, and coverage of sites like Scopus, ResearcherID, PubMed, Google Scholar Citations, ResearchGate, ORCID, Academia.edu and Publons are all discussed here.

The use of these platforms also varies depending on demography. The article is a great insight into all of this, and will surely educate you about tools you can use. So, do read through, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

Detailed blog post Full article QMed's blog - Interesting Articles

Did You Know

The Google Knowledge Graph- Trivia

If you are someone who is generally curious about the tools that the wonderful web brings to you, definitely read up on the Google Knowledge Graph on our blog. The Graph is an optimization tool to complement the existing search bar. It gives you quick, accurate answers on typing any query into the Google feed. Additionally, you will also get relevant suggestions for future searches that you conduct.

The Knowledge Graph comes with live and online tutorials, planned lessons, interactive classroom sessions. You might even be familiar with new developments like the Voice Search and Carousel. The latter is the list of images that come before search results when you type in a query like "List of famous hospitals in India". Continuous efforts are also underway to make the engine complementary to mobile devices so that you end up with a versatile tool.

Detailed blog post Try this for yourself! More - "Do You Knows" from our blogs

From QMed’s Calendar

Workshops

The 100 PGs project: (For more details - click here)

• Mastering PubMed- at Breathing Room, Andheri East - 20 May . Ten PG residents attended the workshop.

May is a month of vacations, hence we did not have institutional workshops. However, we are happy that our 100 PGs project has picked up again, and we are on track with the same. So far 57 PGs have attended our workshops and around nearly 40 more are expected to register very soon!

QMed Participates

As of 22nd May, 2018, we have been chosen to be part of a selective GlobalGiving cohort of 50 not for profit organizations- their Social Impact Academy. The course spans six weeks, has homework and assignments, all to the end of understanding impact measurement. We hope to learn more about practical tools that will help us make future programs, understand our impact better and engage our community more.