QMedCONNECT Newsletter: June 2016

Dear friends

The rains have set in, in our city of Mumbai and there is greenery all around. The weather is definitely more pleasant - being several degrees cooler. With that starts the new academic year and an array of lecture invitations. We are delighted to share that the "College of Physicians and Surgeons" which handles all the Diploma and Fellowship Courses has invited us to deliver lectures on both "Literature Searching" as well as "Reference Management". The regular PG course workshops have still not added the latter though. Kudos CPS! We did three pairs of lectures in June, and have a line up for July for various disciplines.

We are also happy that July and August will have us conducting several workshops - and very specially at UG conferences - Medicon - Lucknow, SIMSCON - Puducherry, Illuminati - Pune, and possibly at Innovation - Mumbai (to be confirmed).

Talking of UG students, one of them wrote a Facebook post where she describer her experience of listening to my lecture on literature searching as "learning the password to Alibaba's caves"! Thank you Snehal Gholap. And another group described the lecture as an experience after which they learnt how to use four principles of searching to reduce their search results from 12000 to 193 articles! Thank you Meet Jain and team for this.

I would strongly recommend that you read the full stories of these students as they wrote in our guest blog posts.

Vasumathi Sriganesh

From our Blog

Dr Navjeevan Singh from the University College of Medical Sciences, Delhi wrote a post for us sharing with us how QMed's workshops (PubMed and Reference Management with Mendeley) made a difference to UCMS. Since we ran the workshop, UCMS has included this training in their thesis writing workshops. We ran our first workshop there in November 2012, and now they have in turn trained 140 students every year!

Here is an excerpt from the blog post he wrote for us.

Every year our thesis writing workshops train 140 students in research. In addition our UG students have set up a rolling system to train their juniors in the craft of literature search and referencing software when they consider applying for summer research projects for the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Documented feedback from our participants affirms that the QMed inspired hands-on sessions on searching the literature, and using Mendeley, the referencing software, are the most popular and highly appreciated.

QMed’s popularity in the UCMS eco-system was evident again when our undergraduate students organized Medicon, a conference for and by UG students interested in research in April 2013. One automatic, hands-down choice, was a literature search session by QMed.

Read his full blog post here

Did You Know

PubMed has made some recent changes. In the "Abstract display", A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) link is displayed if available. And the "Items per page" selection has been moved to the bottom of the results page. To see illustrations click here

To read more of our "Do you know" posts, do check out our blog posts on these

Interesting Reading

Patrick Dunleavy. Thirty one things to consider when choosing which journal to submit your paper to. An online article - read the full text here

Check out 31 factors for choosing a journal to submit your paper - categorised under five heads - scope of a journal; its review processes; open or closed access; coverage, scale and style issues; and lastly, the journal’s dissemination and impact. For every category, the author provides a table - with the heads - criterion, key question and best answer, and covers every factor in good detail. Really worth investing time and understanding each one of these.

To see a collection of articles we have covered earlier, click here

From QMed’s Calendar

Talks on Literature Search / Referencing & Citing at:

• Rajiv Gandhi Medical College- 9th June

• Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital - 10th June

• 'Eye Advanced' event organized by Indian Journal of Ophthalmology in Mumbai - 19th June

• College of Physicians and Surgeons, Mumbai - 23rd June

• Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital - 28th June

• College of Physicians and Surgeons, Mumbai - 29th June

Special Lecture
VS was invited to deliver a lecture on 'Information Technology and the Medical Profession' at the Mumbai University, during a Refresher Course for College Teachers.

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Workshops@QMed

• PubMed Basics - for a consultant from PD Hinduja National Hospital.

• PubMed Basics - for four post-graduate students from Seth GS Medical College & KEM Hospital.

• Reference Management - for four post-graduate students from Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital.

Participant Feedback

1. Very beneficial workshop. Would help me search without wasting a lot of time over things that do not deserve it. Thanks! - Dr Sophie Simon, PG student, Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital.

2. This was an "above my expectation" workshop. I learnt a lot more than I had thought I would. And most of it is stuff I should have known earlier. Nonetheless now I am sure my thesis will be much better than it would have been without this workshop. It is an interactive and hands-on workshop which every PG student should go through before starting their thesis and also should be introduced at the UG level itself to help us learn and apply it earlier and in a better way. A big thanks to Vasu Ma'am for this wonderful workshop. Dr Pradnya Shinde, PG student, Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital.