QMedCONNECT: September 2010

QMedCONNECT Newsletter: Septmeber 2010

Dear friends,

In some ways this was a "Dream Month". We took ahead the plan for a talk / lecture in every medical college. I personally delivered five one hour lectures (we decided to keep the talk between 60 and 90 minutes depending on the need) this month. We also did three PubMed Basics training programs and one workshop on Biostatistics! For October we have four talks and one training program in the pipeline. We do hope to have our schedules like this on a regular basis! The "Friends of the Foundation" idea is also coming up well; we need to fine tune it a little more before we announce all details. We have had a few requests for the SuperCourse CD and have delivered the same. We would like a feedback from those who got this from us, so that we can share them with Ron LaPorte, who made it available to us. Do check out the Article of the month - on a new tool called "Utopia Documents" - a pdf reader that helps link scholarly journal articles to actual research data, with possibilities of interactivity.

I do look forward to your support in any ways that you can for our venture. Right now what we are looking for specifically is funding for travel to different towns / cities to deliver the talk on literature searching and promoting our activities. If anyone is willing to fund even one trip, which maybe by a cost-effective flight / donation of Reward points, for places where I could fly, or II-AC train travel for destinations not reachable by Air, it would be very welcome. In each place I would work at delivering 4-5 lectures in different medical colleges / teaching hospitals or research centres. Do write to us and indicate how you would like to help, and we will make our request when we plan a trip.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

Do You Know?

PubMed - Journal Database: PubMed has a "Journal Database" (you will find the link on the lower half of the PubMed homepage) that helps you find information about Journals. You can find out about journals in a specialty or about one specific journal. To find out information about journals, enter your specialty (eg - Pediatrics) in the Journals Database search box and search. You can limit your search by clicking Limits and selecting "English language" and "Currently indexed in Medline" to restrict your search. To find information about a specific title, enter the title in quotes. You will get details about the journal's ISSN (useful for subscription orders), the website, the publisher, the correct full title and the correct abbreviation. If you click a link called "NLM ID" at the end of each journal's record, you will get still more details like "from which year the journal is indexed in PubMed", any alternate titles for the journals and more.

If you wish to wish to search PubMed for all articles in a specific journal, locate the correct full title or title abbreviation of the journal from the Journals database. Then, in the main PubMed database, enter either of these (correct full or abbreviated title) in quotes, followed by [jour]. Example - "The New England Journal of Medicine"[jour] or "N Engl J Med"[jour], or "Circulation"[jour]

Our New Initiative

Last month we shared with you an idea of a new initiative - to deliver a 90 minute talk on "The importance of literature searching in medical practice and research", and to share some basic ideas on "How to do a good literature search". We did five such talks this month. They are listed in the "What we did" section of this issue.

We once again request interested institutions to get in touch with us. For out of Mumbai institutions, we will do the lectures after fixing around 4-5 lectures in a city / town. We do not charge for this lecture and as a policy we would not even wish to receive a memento for the same. If your institution can support this initiative with whatever honorarium you may pay any guest faculty, this will be gratefully accepted as a donation. Do note that this is not mandatory. We will take care of our travel expenses.

Our Forthcoming Programs / Lectures

5th October 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for students and faculty of the SGRR Institute of Medical Health Sciences, Dehra Dun

6th or 7th October, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for students and faculty of the Herbertpur Christian Hospital, Herbertpur, Dehra Dun (Awaiting confirmation)

10th October, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching at a one-day workshop on Research Methodology, in Patna

11th October, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching at a one-day workshop on Research Methodology, in Kanpur

31st October, 2010: PubMed / Literature Search training program for members of the IAP Navi Mumbai branch (details to be finalized)

We invite medical colleges/hospitals to contact us for organizing a program for PG students, faculty and health professionals. Please check out details at our website.

Other Events of Interest

8th-12th November 2010: Systematic Review Protocol Completion and Review Update Workshop. Conducted by the SACN, CMC Vellore. More details

17th-20th November 2010: Third National Bioethics Conference, organized by the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. More details

3rd-5th December 2010: Workshop on 'Introduction to Clinical Trials and Good Clinical Practices'. NIH supported course, conducted by faculty of SGPGI, Lucknow, at Goa.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.

Resources for You:

Supercourse Lectures. Supercourse is a repository of lectures on Global Health and Prevention designed to improve the teaching of Prevention. Supercourse is a library of 3623 lectures in 30 languages. It has been produced at the WHO Collaborating Center University of Pittsburgh, with core developers Ronald LaPorte and others.

Our Foundation has received a CD of entire content, and are distributing it for free to institutions during our training programs and also to anyone requesting for the same. This will be useful if you do not wish to view all lectures on the Internet for various reasons. Please get in touch with us atinfo@qmedkf.org.in if you wish to receive a copy.

Article of the Month

Attwood TK. et al.

Utopia documents: linking scholarly literature with research data.

Bioinformatics. 2010 Sep 15;26(18):i568-74.

The authors have worked on the gap that exists between the mass of accumulating research data and the voluminous literature that describes and analyses this data. They have developed "Utopia Documents" a tool which is a pdf reader which integrates data analysis tools and visualization with published research articles. The reason for developing this novel pdf reader is that most people tend to read pdfs of articles and not the html versions. Utopia documents enables a shift from the static appearance in pdfs to becoming a dynamic gateway to additional knowledge. Some examples of the utility are - adding definitions to explain terms, transforming figures and tables into more interactive alternatives, and linking of references to source articles. The utility is available at http://getutopia.com

What we did –September 2010

KRM - Preconference Workshops:

29th-30th September - 1st October, 2010: The KRM 2010 Conference - Information Resources, Services and Practices was organized jointly by the Tata Memorial Hospital & the Health Science Library Association of India. Vasumathi Sriganesh had the pleasure of conducting a preconference workshop on "Integrating your Journal Holdings in PubMed" for the librarians who attended the event. It was well appreciated. She also did a second workshop jointly with Dr Medha Joshi, Head, Dept of Library Services of TMH, on the importance of offering Tutorials to library users. Both speakers shared their professional experiences in this domain.

Sessions at UnLtd India

In September, our CEO had a couple of sessions with UnLtd India. One was on measuring impact and through this session, we have some good directions towards measuring the impact of our activities on our target audience - medical students, faculty and practitioners. Ultimately of course the impact has to reach health consumers.

Training Programs / Talks: Literature searching:

5th September, 2010: Talk on effective literature searching at a Conference of the IAP Mumbai branch - EMBICON. The talk was highly appreciated and has resulted in more invitations for lectures and full programs

5th September, 2010: Training program - PubMed Basics - for students of M.Optom program of the Lotus College of Optometry. We always appreciate the Lotus College for having this program for their students soon after they join the Masters Program.

7th September, 2010: Training program - PubMed Basics at Chandigarh (Sponsored program for Nephrologists)

15th September, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for students of the Madras Medical College, Chennai. This was an impromptu and informal event organized by some students. About 40 students attended the talk and shared their appreciation

16th September, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for students and faculty of Stanley Medical College, Chennai. The talk had a mixed audience of some faculty members, a couple of PGs and a large number of Undergraduate students, mostly I-year MBBS students! It was nice to see them listening with fervour and appreciating the talk. I do hope some of them will get back to us when they actually start doing literature searching.

16th September, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for students and practitioners at the Childs Trust Hospital, Chennai. This was an event that resulted from the IAP EMBICON lecture. Around 50 DNB students and a dozen faculty members attended the lecture and have assured us of planning workshops, taking our help for upgrading their library activities and promised to become "Friends of QMedKF".

17th September, 2010: Talk on Literature Searching for around 80 students and faculty of the Chettinad University, Chennai. The Vice Chancellor and the CME coordinator also attended and appreciated the talk.

18th September, 2010: Training program - PubMed Basics - in Delhi. (Sponsored program for Nephrologists)

26th September, 2010: Workshop - "Playschool of Biostatistics". This was the first time we organized a workshop on this topic. Dr Puneet Gupta from Indore conducted the program and it was well appreciated. We had 14 participants.

29th September, 2010: Preconference workshop: Integrating Library Holdings in PubMed. At the KRM 2010, Information Resources, Services and Practices organized jointly by Tata Memorial Hospital & HLAI, at TMH, Mumbai

Document Delivery of Journal Articles

In the month of September 2010, we delivered 132 articles to individual members, libraries and corporate clients. The total number of documents delivered since April 2010 is 806.

Funding

For any not-for-profit organization, sustenance is a challenge every now and then. Assurance of basic needs (infrastructure and salaries) makes a huge difference to the time we can commit to carry out activities. Contributions from those who sincerely believe that our activities are vital will be deeply appreciated.
We accept donations by cheques in favour of Quality Medical Knowledge Foundation. You may send the cheques to our address, or you could ask us for our account details. You will get the applicable IT Exemption for donations under Section 80G of the Indian Income Tax Act.

Quote of the Month

Knowledge is power, knowledge management is the use of power for good.

Sir Liam Donaldson speaking at the launch of the patient safety domain of 'QualityHealthCare.org', National Patient Safety Agency, London. 18th March 2003.

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

We have added 25 new sites in September and the total number of sites is about 3160.

We invite volunteers to add new sites. If you would like to help, do write to us and we will send you a set of instructions that will make it easier for you to work. Please write "Volunteering for Indian Medical Sites" in the Subject of the email.