QMedCONNECT: January - February 2013

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: January- February 2013

Dear friends

Two months of the New Year have whizzed away, while we have been working hard on some new activities. Soon after we mailed our last newsletter, we launched a brand new version of Indian Medical Sites - available at www.indianmedicalsites.in. Many of you wrote back with very nice words. We still have many big plans for making it a very reliable directory to find institutions, publications and other resources in the field of Indian health and medicine. We do still find that many important institutions do not have websites yet and they unfortunately cannot be listed in our directory

Two more major changes are in the offing. In the next few days, we will be launching our blog. We hope all of you will subscribe to it and follow us. We will then stop emailing the newsletter, though it will still be available on our website. We would welcome suggestions for the blog once we are up on the web. The second change is a brand new version of our Foundation’s website!

This year, we hope to conduct lots more workshops (our goal is to do fifty!). We have done two so far and a third is scheduled in March. We request medical colleges and hospitals to get in touch to plan them.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Help QMed GROW

We have grown slowly and steadily in our first five years. We now need to ensure sustenance and also work towards quicker growth to reach out to all health science students and professionals who need us! How can you help us grow and reach out?

1. Become a Friend of QMed
How do you become a Friend of QMed? If you are a member of INFORMER, you automatically one. Others, click the link above and follow the few small, but important steps. Remember you can donate any amount you choose to!

2. Contribute to QMed
Whether you become a Friend to learn from us, or anyway simply wish to contribute: To make a donation, check out the page http://qmednew.qmed.org.in/contribute/. You will get the applicable IT Exemption for donations under Section 80G of the Indian Income Tax Act. We accept donations from foreign citizens and entities, as we are registered for the FCRA.

3. Get featured in Indian Medical Sites
In our new version of www.indianmedicalsites.in - we will not only acknowledge donors, but every month, the top 15 donors will have their websites featured in special areas!

Do You Know?

The Directory of Indian Medical Sites allows you to personalize it! Create your account and you can get alerts of new sites, by choosing any category and requesting alerts. When you run a search, you could save it. You can also create a list of favourite sites and share any of them through social media.

Forthcoming Training Programs on literature searching and reference management

• Mar 23, 2013 - PubMed Basics - at Jaslok Hospital

• Apr 11, 2013 - Searching Medical Literature - at Medicon 2013

If you would like to organize interactive hands on workshops on searching PubMed / Cochrane Library and on organizing / citing your references using a Reference Manager Software in your institution, do write to us at info@qmedkf.org.in If you wish to attend programs that we organize, do give us your details so that we could get in touch.

Other Events of Interest

• Public Health Foundation of India's events in March 2013. More details

• Pharmatech - A ten day workshop on various aspects Drug Development and including a lot about research and writing, at KEM Hospital, Mumbai - April 1 - 10, 2013. More details

• Medicon 2013 - the Sixth International Medical Students’ Research Conference, at UCMS, Delhi - April 11 -14. More details

• Art & Science of Writing a Paper - Organized by “Indian Pediatrics” - 14th - 15 Sept at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi. More details

If you are organizing or know about other conferences, pre-conference workshops or training programs related to medical research, do let us know; we would like to include these in our website and newsletter.

Forthcoming Lectures at:

• Mar 19 - Literature search - at AIIMS, Bhubaneswar

• Mar 19 - Reference management - at AIIMS, Bhubaneswar

• Apr 03 - Literature search - at PHARMATECH-2013organized by the Dept of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, KEM Hospital

• Apr 05 - Literature search - at a preconference workshop on Medical Writing, at the 28th ICON Meeting - ( Indian Cooperative Oncology Network)

Resources for You

Supercourse Lectures. Supercourse is a repository of lectures on Global Health and Prevention. if you wish to receive a copy, do write to us at info@qmedkf.org.in

Article of the Month

Mosa AS, Yoo I.
A Study on Pubmed Search Tag Usage Pattern: Association Rule Mining of a Full-day Pubmed Query Log
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2013 Jan 9;13:8.

Note from QMed: “Search tags” in PubMed are methods by which a user could ask for a search term to be (compulsorily) present in the title or as a “MeSH term” (which means the article is “about” that term, whether the search term is present in the title or abstract or not). There are several search tags that can be used in PubMed to refine searches.

This article is extremely unusual and interesting. It is an analysis of the use of search tags while search PubMed. It is interesting for two reasons. The first, is the topic itself and the methodology used. The second is related to the authors’ findings. The authors have analyzed a day’s queries in PubMed, after getting the data from the National Library of Medicine (and ensuring anonymity of users of the day). A total of 2,917,159 queries were selected for this study issued by a total of 613,061 users. The authors checked if and how search tags were used in these. The results were interesting because they showed that the percentage of search tag usage was low (11.38% of the total queries). The authors conclude that users do not use tags because they are not aware of such features and need further education for better usage. We are once again sure that we are on the right track at QMed - teaching everyone how to use tags and more!

What we did – January- February 2013

Talks on literature searching / referencing /citing at

• IJO - Research Methodology workshop, at JJ Hosptial - Jan 5

• DNB students workshop at KEM - Jan 24

• Research Methodology workshop at Sion Ayurved Mahavidyalaya - Feb 6

• Research Methodology workshop at Institute of Nursing Education - Feb 21

Interactive workshops

• PubMed - Interactive, & Reference Management with Mendeley - hands on half day workshop at Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed University, for 40 faculty members - Feb 14

• PubMed & Cochrane Library - interactive hands on workshop for PG students, faculty and librarians of Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi - 30 participants - Feb 24

Workshop at Bharati Vidyapeeth, Pune

Workshop at Amrita Institute, Kochi

Document Delivery of Journal Articles

In the month of January and February 2013, we delivered 57 articles to individual members & libraries. The total number of documents delivered since April 2012 is 440.

Quote of the Month

“The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.”
Sir William Osler (1849 – 1919)
Note from QMed: It is still more true in the “Information Era” - librarians manage information and help users get the most relevant information from the ocean called the Internet!

Directory of Indian Medical Sites (www.indianmedicalsites.in)

The Directory has not only been revamped with a new website, but we have worked hard on cleaning up dead links, discarding some sites with good reasons, merged some and are currently at 3525 sites. We would love to have volunteers to help add new sites, recategorize some and more. If you would like to help, do write to us . We promise it will be exciting!