The Last Post

The librarians at Bond are trying a new approach to our blogging practices, so this will be the last post for the HSM Library Matters blog!

From now on all the Faculty Librarians, myself included, will be posting news and other useful information on one Library blog, the L Files. This will be the one place to keep in touch with all library-related information, including updates relevant for Health Sciences and Medicine, so click that link! Once you've clicked you can subscribe on the right hand side. Join us on the L Files!

Should we pay attention to journal impact?

The validity of the Impact Factor as a measure of journal quality (and also the quality of the articles contained therein) is increasingly being questioned. Should the academic community wean itself off this measure, essentially by paying it a lot less attention?

This article (and the discussion in the comments) captures some of the aspects of this issue quite well.

The Persistent Lure of the Impact Factor - Even for PLOS ONE

For those new to the discussion, the Impact Factor is a metric assigned to journals by Thomson Reuters. The Impact Factor of a journal for a given year is the average number of times its articles published in the preceeding two years have been cited that year. So the 2012 Impact Factor for a journal is the average number of times its 2010 and 2011 articles were cited in 2012. As it's based on citations, the Impact Factor is intended to be an indication of journal quality, and it is sometimes used to assess the quality of articles themselves (an article is published in a high impact journal, therefore it is high quality). Some of the objections to these uses are addressed in the article linked to above. It's an interesting issue and one with increasing prominence.

Journal Impact Factors can be found using Thomson Reuter's Journal Citation Reports. For more information about measuring research impact see this webpage, and feel free to get in touch.

Open access assists with cancer breakthrough

Jake Andraka is a 16 year old from the US who's invented a new method for detecting pancreatic cancer that's being called 'potentially revolutionary'. To do it, he used lab time at John Hopkins School of Medicine, and whatever research articles he could get freely on the web - the following video makes some interesting points about the value of open access to research articles:




Open access to research publications is an increasingly prominent issue - both the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council now mandate open access to publications which result from their funding (the US National Institutes of Health and Research Councils UK have similar requirements). If you're a researcher, Bond Library can help with this issue - Bond's research repository epublications@bond is one way to make your work instantly available on the web. Contact us for more information.

If you're a student, chances are you've come across the paywalls Jake talks about in that video. Again, the Library can help! Bond pays for access to a huge range of academic articles, and if we don't already have access we can usually get it.So don't pay money for articles - ask us!

Photo sharing for doctors

Here's a fascinating idea which may be of interest to students and staff of HSM: crowdsourced photo-sharing for health professionals. A new iPhone app, called Figure 1, allows doctors and other health professionals to share photos of interesting medical cases they encounter. The medical images may be of things rarely seen, or of textbook examples of more common conditions - all allow health professionals to learn from the situations encountered by others around the world, which might otherwise never be seen.



There's a bit more information on Figure 1 in this article.

Try DynaMed until 14 July

The library has currently arranged trial access to DynaMed, so you can get full access until 14 July. This resource will be of particular interest to medical students and staff.

DynaMed is a point-of-care tool, intended to provide evidence-based answers to clinical questions quickly and easily (similar to UpToDate, BMJ Best Practice, eTG Complete and many others). More information about DynaMed is available on their website.

Access DynaMed here (or you can search the Bond website for 'trials' to find it).


The library is currently considering whether DynaMed might be a useful option for Bond. Your feedback is very welcome, just send me an email.

This video will tell you nothing at all about DynaMed, but it's highly amusing (it does go on a bit long though). There's obviously some creative types in the Uni of Calgary medicine program:

Improved access to Trip database

Many of you in the Health Sciences and Medicine will be familiar with the Trip database; it's a freely available clinical search engine for finding evidence to support practice/care.

Recently Trip announced some improvements to the way they link to the full-text of primary research articles, and the library has now set this up so it will work for Bond staff/students.

You need to have a free Trip account for this to work, so if you haven't already, click 'Sign up' on the top right. When creating your free account make sure you select Bond University as your institution.

If you already have a Trip account, log in and click Settings in the top right, and then select Bond University under Your Institutions.

And that's it! From now on when you're searching Trip, make sure you log in, and certain results (primary research articles) will have a Bond.Au full-text link as follows:

 

That Bond.Au link will give you the access that Bond has paid for, so if our subscriptions cover it, you'll go straight to the full text. Any questions or problems please get in touch!

JAMA access problems

** Update - the problems accessing JAMA now appear to have been resolved. If you do still have any  difficulties please contact me **

There currently seem to be problems with accessing JAMA. This is affecting off-campus access including wireless devices, and some Bond PCs. Some Bond PCs do seem to still be able to access JAMA without a problem.

The issues seem to be due to some technical changes made at JAMA's end, and they are working on resolving these. Hopefully very shortly all will be up and running again.

Changes to Vancouver referencing at Bond

I just wanted to flag some future changes to Vancouver referencing at Bond. In particular, the Library's guide to the Vancouver style will be changing slightly. This may affect staff/students of the MBBS program.

Why change anything? Currently there's no EndNote style which produces Vancouver as outlined in the guide I just linked to. So currently EndNote can't be used for Vancouver referencing as we prescribe it. The changes will be small, and fix this. Students will also then be producing referencing in the style required by a major journal (JAMA).

I hope to update the guide early this semester, but there will be further communication beforehand. If you have any questions/concerns about this at the moment though please get in touch.

It's very difficult to find an image related to 'referencing'! So instead here's a nice pic of Vancouver :)