QMedCONNECT Newsletter: July 2018

Dear friends

A big hello to all once more! I just got back from Bhubaneshwar on Aug 1, after being one of the faculty members at an intense workshop for medical college faculty and public health professionals. Conducting this with The Union as a collaboration, is one of the very nice developments in the history of QMed. This is the fourth such collaborative event, and we hope for many more.

This month we feature the NCBI Bookshelf from the NLM. Do check out the rich reading resources! And - have you wondered about which referencing tool you should be using? Read the article by Camille and colleagues and learn more!

At QMed we went through a six week learning program from GlobalGiving, where we learned a lot about measuring the impact of the work we do. We look forward to working towards this.

Our Elearning course - Mastering PubMed is doing well. In two months we have 42 enrollments and four have successfully completed the course.

We recently had some very nice experiences in our lectures and workshops. When we asked "What were the "Aha moments" in your learning, one student answered - "The whole session"! And the rest immediately agreed. Some participants have volunteered to share their experiences a month after their learning experiences. These are all steps to pushing up our impact measurements. We aim to share results in the future months

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Did You Know

NCBI Bookshelf

This month, we look into a bookshelf that life sciences students/ professors/ practitioners can carry with them everywhere! The NCBI Bookshelf has been existing since 1999, and is home to a host of educational resources in the life sciences that you can access for free. The most popular resources accessed via this tool remains textbooks. It has been of immense help to both students and professors, the former because of the mobility of access, the latter having the means to access high quality resources to educate both themselves and their students.

The Bookshelf also comes with the pedigree of being a product of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It is also a good practice for authors and publishers to make their textbooks available for free online via this tool, because, in the longer run, it increases their visibility and helps them to reach out to larger audiences.

So, do go ahead and read our post to know more about this tool. You can also read this additional blog post to learn some more details about the NCBI Bookshelf.

Interesting Article

Ivey Camille, Crum Janet. Choosing the Right Citation Management Tool: Endnote, Mendeley, Refworks, or Zotero.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2018.468

Academic publications come with exhaustive procedures of procuring good literature, gathering data from credible sources, analyzing this data, penning this analysis, submitting for review and giving due credit. While there are no substitutes for the work and knowledge this requires, a part of your task can be made easy by the use of reference management tools. Many of us have had trouble with paper submissions owing to the tedious, laborious necessity of getting our references in order. Awareness of reference management tools will enable you to compile your reference list smoothly and know which to use for the kind of research you are conducting.

In this article, Camille Ivey and Janet Crum discuss the most popular of these tools. Citation management tools have existed since the 1980s to help with organization of references, searching databases, and making bibliography based on your citation style of choice. New features keep getting added to keep up with technological advances. Upon reading this article, you will understand the functionalities of Endnote, Mendeley, Refworks and Zotero. You will learn about existing versions, their compatibility, whether you have free and full access to all features, and whether they are suited to your area of research.

To learn more, read our blog post!

From QMed’s Calendar

Workshops

• Collaborative workshop with "The Union" (formerly IUATLD), for medical college faculty and public health workers from all over India, at Bhubaneshwar - 30 and 31 July

Lectures

• KEM- Research Methodology Workshop Lecture - 19th July.

• GMC- Research Methodology Workshop Lecture- 25 July.

• Nair Endocrinology - Research Methodology Workshop for DM Endocrinology students , July 28.

Guest lectures

• Indian Pharmacovigilance Day - July 27

QMed Participates

• We participated in the Social Impact Academy in the months of June and July. It was a cohort of 50 organizations chosen by Global Giving to teach us all about planning and measuring the long term impact of our work. It was a month of intense self-learning, after which we learnt the importance of the stories we tell, the frames into which we fit our daily activities, and the feedback we collect. We are proud to have been a part of this academy and are excited to translate everything that we have learnt into discernible actions

• Over 4000 organizations participated in the Global Giving Bonus Day held on July 18. The highest amount raised was about 27,000$ which, grants and a bonus added, totaled $35,000. Congratulations to the much deserving “Reading Village.” We attracted 11 donors and raised $548. The amount is precious to us and a reminder of how incomplete we would be without our donors and friends encouraging us every step of the way. We also got a match of $112- thank you, Global Giving!

On July 13, 2018, Vasumathi Sriganesh was invited to participate in a panel discussion on a session: Education in Radiology: Changing needs and opportunities for the future radiologist. This was at an event organized by Express Healthcare in association with the Radiology Education Foundation. The panelists included

◆ Dr Akshay Baheti, Assistant Professor, TMH, Mumbai (Moderator)

◆ Dr Sumer Sethi, Founder, DAMS & Telerad Providers

◆ Dr Raju Sharma, Professor of Radiology, AIIMS

◆ Vasumathi Sriganesh, QMed Knowledge Foundation

◆ Dr Deelip Mhaisekar,VC, MUHS

◆ Dr Nandini Bahiri - HOD of the Radiology Department, Govt Hosp in Jamnagar

The topics covered were exams/assessments, subspecialization and research; Vasumathi spoke on the changes needed with respect to improving research.

• Pharmacological vigilance Event 27 July. Vasumathi Sriganesh, Dipti Suvarna and Jayanthi Raghunath participated in this event. We learned a lot about the domain of Pharmacovigilance and interacted with professionals working in this domain.