QMedCONNECT: Highlights 

February 2021

What do we have for you this month?

As promised earlier, this month we shared a number of resources on our social media, our blogs and on our site. Each resource is useful for someone in some context. You could have missed one or more of those - so here is a compilation. 

Our Founder - Vasumathi Sriganesh has three blog posts for you - one covering the new expectations from libraries & librarians, the second discussing research ethics in an unusual context and the third - an update about a new site with details about Medline. We also share an article about a new term - "Infodemic" (information overload during a pandemic) and how librarians help cope with this. 

Then, we have a few important articles in the context of medical research, and information about a journal dedicated to Evidence based reviews. We share a site- LitCOVID - by the NLM - for Covid updates.

And as February has five international health observances, for each of them, we present a PubMed search result - that gives you free articles to read on these topics. 

That is a lot of learning you could do!!

And what are updates for you, from QMed? 

We are proud to announce that AIIMS Guwahati has joined QMed in its mission of improving literature searching and referencing skills in the country. Welcome to our latest institutional subscriber! 

And we have been awarded the prestigious GuideStar India Transparency Key award for 2021 and have joined India’s largest pool of credible NGOs after undergoing a rigorous due diligence process. Now that IS something important for you. 

The QMed Team 

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Our Social Media posts this month

Articles we featured

1st Feb - BMC Med Res Methodology 
COVID-19-related medical research: a meta-research and critical appraisal   -

5th Feb - Indian Journal of Gastroenterology
Publication ethics: Role and responsibility of authors 

8th Feb - Indian journal of psychological medicine. 
Expanding Mental Health Research in India and Providing Funding Agencies- Is the Need of the Hour 

16th Feb -  Systematic Reviews
PRISMA-S: an extension to the PRISMA Statement for Reporting Literature Searches in Systematic Reviews

 

A Journal that covers Systematic Reviews and Evidence Syntheses

18th Feb - Not too many know about the JBI (https://jbi.global/) as an important resource for systematic reviews and evidence synthesis. Do learn more! about their journal - JBI Evidence Synthesis)

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From our Blog - Our CEO's Posts

Vasumathi

Vasumathi Sriganesh shares her views and about a useful website

Health science libraries and librarians - rewrite the expectations!

Should the library be closed? This was a question I found in the main library file, when I joined the  Hinduja Hospital as Librarian in March 1992. That was nearly three decades ago. 

The same question seems to be threatening to loom up in many libraries now. How can we rewrite the expectations about libraries and librarians? 

Read more.

About "Medline" and getting a journal selected for Medline indexing

Medline. PubMed. Two words used often without a person being sure if they are the same, if they are different and if yes, what is the difference. The other confusion is about getting a journal included for selection -  again in PubMed / in Medline...

The NLM where Medline originates has put up a brand new website to give us all information in one place. 

Read more.

Sci-hub and ethics

Ethics can be ever so confusing! The black and white areas are in writing, or are taught to us as we grow, but it is the grey areas that cause an issue.

A really huge confusion today is about Sci-hub I wonder if we should even call it a resource...

Read more.

From our Blog - International Observances

International Days

The month of February has five observances. We searched PubMed for articles of interest in each of these areas. We have provided "PubMed results" - which link to the search we did, retrieving articles available free.  

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Oral Pathologist Day

Feb 26 - On this observance - here is something for Oral Pathologists - a link to free articles in PubMed about Oral Pathology from India. 

PubMed results

International Childhood Cancer Day

Feb 15 - This is a day to raise awareness about childhood cancer, and to support the management of this condition.

Here is a link to reviews on different childhood cancers in the last one year: 

PubMed Results

Sexual & Reproductive Health Awareness Day

Feb 12 marks a day of Sexual and Reproductive awareness worldwide. There is immense scope for work among health professionals in this area, particularly taking into account communities that bear the brunt of poor delivery such as transgenders and young adolescents in third world countries.

A number of systematic reviews have been made available in PubMed to help you initiate better healthcare policies, and you can access them here. 

PubMed Results

International Day of Women and Girls in Science

11th February is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

The Female Physician Compensation Report released by Medscape reports a difference of thirty two percent between male and female health professionals, equally equipped and in the same line of work. As in many domains, in healthcare too we observe underrepresentation and gaps in wages on the basis of gender.

PubMed results

World Cancer Day

Feb 4 - World Cancer Day is an initiative of Union for International Cancer Control, a major torchbearer working towards initiatives to integrate cancer control into the world's health and development agenda.

At the crux of this is the faith that diagnosis, treatment, and care should be available for all, irrespective of their bearings.

PubMed Results

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From our Blog - Interesting Articles

Interesting Articles

Infodemic - the avalanche! Who can help?

The library's role in countering infodemics
Walker P. J Med Libr Assoc. 2021 Jan 1;109(1):133-136

The World Health Organization recently labeled the COVID-19 pandemic as an 'Infodemic'. As the term suggests, an infodemic translates to an aggressive growth in the amount of information available regarding a topic of interest, so much so that a potential solution becomes more and more convoluted.

This article divulges the massive growth in COVID data. It reads that, as of the 28th of August 2020, a simple search with the keyword 'COVID-19' provides 47,405 results in PubMed; 1,717 yields on bioRxiv.org; 6368 on medRxiv.org, and more than a million outputs in Google.

Read more.

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From our Blog - Do You Know?

Do you know

There are wonderful resources out on the Internet which we may or may not be aware of.  We at QMed share these with you, whenever we learn about them.

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LitCovid by the NLM - track the COVID-19 literature

LitCovid is a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus. It is the most comprehensive resource on the subject, providing a central access to a huge and every growing list of  relevant articles in PubMed. The articles are updated daily and are further categorized by different research topics and geographic locations for improved access.

Read more.

Evidence Aid’s COVID-19 project:

The project is almost one year old and the team at EVIDENCE AID has prepared nearly 500 short, plain language summaries covering more than 750 systematic reviews relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact. The summaries are available in English, with translations into several other languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; with links to all the full reviews. If anyone would like to receive update about these directly, please write to callen evidenceaid org https://evidenceaid.org/evidence/coronavirus-covid-19/

Read more.

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Webinars this month

17-02-2021 - Cafe Roentgen Webinars by the Radiology Education Foundation - 284 participants. Topic - Literature searching & referencing.

24-02-2021 - Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Nursing - 205 participants.
Topic - Reference management with Mendely.

24-02-2021 - St. Francis Institute of Technology Library & BKC-Knowledge Network - 84 participants.
The last was a webinar on Return of Investment in Libraries. This was a talk for library professionals.

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QMedCourses News

 

AIIMS Guwahati joins us for Institutional access for QMed Courses! To start, twenty faculty have enrolled. The institution is brand new and they will later add more faculty and students. 

 
We present some current statistics about the overall progress of our courses.

Course

Certified

Total Enrolled

Information Resources & Literature Searching (IRLS)

284

2408

Introduction to Referencing (IR)

187

491

Mastering PubMed (PM)

115

2042

Reference Management with Mendeley (RMM)

97

2042

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Testimonials for QMedCourses

Course: Information Resources & Literature Searching 
I took this course to learn literature searching for an international research project that I am working on. Such free resources are extremely scarce and I am very glad I found this. It is at par with international online courses I have taken. Kudos!. Vaishnavi Chiddarwar, Dep Physiotherapy,DY Patil University, Navi Mumbai.

Course : Introduction to Referencing
A great job done by everyone involved. Such courses are very much needed,especially in these times where plagiarism is such a huge issue. Jayden Lhamu Bhutia, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences, Gangtok, Sikkim.

Course : Mastering PubMed
I learnt a lot and it gave me a good grounding in the basics. I found the course interesting and rewarding. I enjoyed your course tremendously and I look forward to taking another class with you. Sravya Vannada, Student, NIPER Mohali.

Course : Reference Management with Mendeley
I was using Mendeley already but was surprised to know so many new features which I was unaware of. Thanks, this will make writing and searching easier and of better quality! Also like to mention about the prompt replies to doubts. Mayuri Raul, Seth G.S.M.C. & K.E.M. Hospital-Community Medicine.

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