QMedCONNECT JAN 2018: Learn about WHO's Global Health Library. Is Abstract = Full Text? Read more...

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: January 2018

Dear friends

Welcome to the first of QMedCONNECT for 2018. With five lectures and one workshop, it was a busy month indeed. I also had one very special event. At MECOR - a workshop organized by a group of committed physician volunteers of the American Chest Society, I mentored several participants, with their literature searches for their research projects. This happened over four days in Bangalore. I hope this year will see lots more of workshops. I am also excited to be conducting the first workshop for the Campbell Collaboration, on searching for studies for a systematic review, on the 31st of Jan and 1st of Feb.

We did very well on GlobalGiving in the last year. GlobalGiving is the non profit from the US, that hosts our fund raiser page. To recognize our good work, GG has awarded us three badges, which I am proud to share

Badges - 1:
As a Vetted NGO
Badge 2:
One of the top ranked NGOs and
Badge 3:
As an NGO whose activities have been verified with a site visit by GlobalGiving

We had a site visit by Ms Kavita Mathew who works for GG from India, and coaches and advises several non profits in India, that have a presence on GlobalGiving. We also had a peer mentoring from a person from another Indian non profit - Mr Venkat Ramakrishnan. Thanks to these, our scores on GlobalGiving have shot up, and we have several opportunities to raise more funds.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Did You Know

WHO's Global Health Library

The GHL is an initiative of WHO launched in 2005. It is an index of of scientific and technical literature produced in low- and middle- income countries. The purpose is to increase the access to information and scientific evidence on health, particularly in developing regions.

In 2015, the GHL, adopted the name of Global Index Medicus. It is an international platform for collection, organization, dissemination and access to reliable health sciences information sources across the globe. GIM is an central search platform for a) Five Regional indexes, b) Global indexes of databases like MEDLINE, SciELO and c) The WHO institutional repository.

Click here for Detailed blog post

Click here to check out this resource

Interesting Reading

Scoping Review of Comparisons between Abstracts and Full Reports in Primary Biomedical Research. BMC medical research methodology. 2017 Dec;17(1):181.

Are you among those people who decide to cite a paper by reading only its Abstract? If yes, then you need to think again. The possibility is you may miss some important findings which the abstract failed to include from the full text! Some of the reasons why readers almost always rely on the abstract alone are - the full text is in a foreign language, it is just not available anywhere, or it is too expensive to lay one's hands on. These are understandable reasons. But quite a few researchers make the mistake of believing that reading an abstract is good enough. And that is wrong.

The authors of this article used a proper statistical method to measure the inconsistency in an article & its abstract. And found various minor and major inconsistencies in the abstracts. Based on those, it is suggested that the authors, reviewers and editorial staff should carefully scrutinize the consistency and accuracy of an abstract, during the submission and peer-review processes.

Now, do you believe this abstract or will you read the article? We suggest you read the full text :)

From QMed’s Calendar

Talks on Literature Search / Referencing & Citing at

• Pendharkar college - lecture at a workshop for members of the Association of Teachers of Biological Sciences, 6 January, 2018

• Seva Mandal college of Nursing - Lecture at RMWS for faculty, 10 January, 2018

• KEM Hospital - Lecture at an RMWS workshop for DNB students, 12 January, 2018

• ESI - PGIMER - Lecture at the RMWS workshop - 24 January, 2018

• Sion Ayurved Mahavidyalaya - Lecture at the RMWS workshop - 24 January, 2018

Workshops:

• MECOR - An Annual Workshop organized by a body with the same name - MECOR - made up of volunteers from the American Chest Society. MECOR conducts this week long workshop in India and some more developing countries. Our Founder has been associated with MECOR workshops for years. While every year, Ms Vasumathi had delivered lectures and done a little mentoring, this year, it was more focused on mentoring participants. MECOR has taken the need for good searching skills seriously and every year examines how participants can learn more of this from us

• Campbell Collaboration: Workshop at Chitkara University Chandigarh - Searching for studies for Systematic Reviews - 31 January & 1 February. Thi is the first workshop in collaboration with Campbell.

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From Our Picture Gallery

Lecture at KEM for DNB students.

Lecture at Seva Mandal College of Nursing