QMedCONNECT: Oct 2017 - Free articles: a tool to get them; Communicating research results to the public

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: October 2017

Dear friends

October was the festive month of Diwali - probably one of the biggest festivals of India. We trust all of you had a good and safe Diwali.

In this issue, we share with you an interesting tool - Kopernio which seems to be a near answer to everyone's problem about getting full text articles. And then the article highlighting how any science research communication should reach the public is something very interesting to read.

The number of events for QMed was lower in October - only two lectures and one workshop. The workshop was however a different one and I enjoyed working on this one. It was a workshop on meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and the elements that one needed to know. Conducted by the Dept of Clinical Pharmacology, KEM Hospital for the medical writing team at Pfizer, it was a two day workshop, and I was allotted most of Day - 1 to teach systematic searching as well as managing references. The feedback from participants was excellent and included the most common one - "I wish I had learnt it earlier"!

We have not been able to do more of the workshops for our 100 PGs project for a whole number of reasons. I will be blogging about this soon. Speaking of blogs, we have made every effort to revive our blog and we request all to subscribe to it to stay updated with several developments.

November is a milestone month for us. QMed once again collaborates with The Union, and I will be doing my first International Workshop at Mandalay, Myanmar on the 10th - teaching PubMed in detail. Day -2 will be on Reference Management, where I will support a few participants and assist overall.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Do You Know

A tool for fetching free articles

Kopernio (earlier known as Canary Haz) is a browser plugin which enables researchers to surf multiple journal websites on a single interface. Behind the scenes Kopernio will search open databases and (where possible) find the best version of the paper for you.

It integrates with Google Scholar and PubMed so that it gives you a notification about the access/availability of an article, as you browse. It also integrates with library subscriptions, so with a one-time authentication you can access your library holdings anywhere and at any time.

Where possible, Kopernio will retrieve the final published version of the journal article. For non-open access articles and which are not available via your institutional subscription, Kopernio will try find an alternative version instead. After downloading PDFs it gives options of saving in the Kopernio storage for up to 1000 MB and sharing with other friends. It has options of adding tags, copying citations, online tutorials, searching in your Kopernio account and more…

Read our full blog post for more

More "Do you know" posts in our blog

Interesting Reading

Science Communication to the General Public

Brownell SE., Price JV., & Steinman L.

Science Communication to the General Public: Why We Need to Teach Undergraduate and Graduate Students this Skill as Part of Their Formal Scientific Training.

Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education. 2013;12(1):E6-E10. PMCID: PMC3852879

Do you think that communication of science to the general public is a responsibility of scientists? Scientists over a period of their professional lives naturally become very specialized in their knowledge. This, combined with the absence of formal training in science communication probably makes it difficult for them to communicate their knowledge in a simple lay-person oriented manner. The authors of this article provide guidance on communication skills with an emphasis on interaction with a layperson audience. With specific examples derived from their own experience they describes the needs, difficulties as well as solutions for providing communication training to scientist.

From QMed’s Calendar

Talks on Literature Search / Referencing & Citing at

• Rajiv Gandhi Medical College, Kalwa - 5th Oct

• Seth GSMC and KEM Hospital - 10th Oct

Workshops

• Literature search and reference management for meta-analyses and systematic reviews - 12th Oct
Invited by the Dept of Clinical Pharmacology to collaborate, to conduct a workshop on Meta-Analysis, for the medical writers at Pfizer Ltd and PG students of the dept. Vasumathi Sriganesh conducted sessions on creating detailed search strategies for literature searches for systematic reviews, and then the use of Mendeley for reference management

QMed Participates

Websites, Social Media and Google for non-profits - Oct 26

Fatima and Vasumathi participated in a workshop organized by the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy, on this topic. The presenter - Ketan Parekh gave all participants (all from the non-profit sector) key insights into website content planning, social media and apps and tools for non profits.

Website Making Workshop - Oct 28

Vasumathi and Swapnali participated in a workshop on website making, conducted by Rishi Gangoly. All participants learned some very key points about planning and creating a website and maintaining the same. Rishi packed in the key essentials in a day. He offers a consulting service by which we always have his expertise available for any queries or additions. Thank you Rishi!

With both these workshops, we are better prepared to improve our communication spaces!