Have a manuscript that is just about ready for publication? Not sure which journal is the best fit? Do you need to find peer reviewers? The Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE) might be of use to you! JANE can recommend journal titles based on the words used in your abstract or the title of your manuscript. It is simple to use. Copy your title or abstract and paste it into the JANE search box. Choose “Find Journals”, and JANE will provide a...
PubMed Health is a National Library of Medicine resource for patients and clinicians. It focuses on what works with disease prevention and treatment (clinical effectiveness). It searches PubMed for systematic reviews, but also contains executive summaries of those systematic reviews. Executive summaries highlight the findings of systematic reviews in an easy to read form; they cut to the chase, so to speak. PubMed Health contents include DARE (Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects) reviews, clinical guides, and a list of...
To vaccinate or not to vaccinate has been a topic of controversy for awhile now. California has experienced a measles outbreak every year for the past 3 years. Public health officials in Michigan are concerned about outbreaks here as well. The Michigan DHHS began an advertising campaign encouraging parents to have their children vaccinated. According to the announcement, MI ranks 43rd in the US for vaccination currency with only 54% of kids fully up to date on their vaccinations. The...
Do you need a topic for your research paper? Are you having difficulty thinking of a subject? There are a few places you can turn to garner some ideas. Medical/health news sites are good places to start. Check out what is making health news and see if anything sparks an interest or spawns an idea. HealthNewReview is exactly what it sounds like; it is a blog that reviews health news from a number of media outlets that offer claims of...
May 6th through May 12th is the week designated to celebrate and appreciate all that nurses do. Personally, I think it should be a whole month – and that still would not be long enough. The National Library of Medicine has an interesting digital exhibition in their History of Medicine archives: Pictures of Nursing. It is a collection of postcards with nursing images. One of the postcards is of the Starship Enterprise crew, which apparently included a nurse, Nurse...
Photo by Myrmi...
Thomas Starzl was known as “the Father of Modern Transplantation”. He performed the world’s first liver transplant in a human in 1963 while at the University of Colorado. In 1980, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh and performed the world’s first heart-liver transplant in 1984. While Dr. Starzl pioneered the surgical techniques he used in transplantation surgeries, his work on pharmaceuticals for immunosuppression was also groundbreaking. He, along with Dr. John Fung, developed Tacrolimus, one of the most widely...
Each year, in their April Fools Day issue, some of the prestigious medical journals lighten-up and print an article or two of less than serious research. In 2015, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study looking at the following question: does an apple a day truly keep the doctor away? The article titled, Association Between Apple Consumption and Doctor Visits, was a cross sectional study of 8,399 eligible adults. Data was pulled from 2007-2008 and 2009-2010...
The Greater Midwest Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine has launched its Underserved Health Communities Project. The project aims to educate people about “factors and behaviors which contribute to a community’s underserved health status; provide for discovery and interaction “with health data and information resources”; and offer “education and outreach awards “to increase health literacy in an underserved area.” The project website offers an “an interactive map showing data and stories related to twenty medically underserved counties...
I’ve highlighted the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) medical history collection in the past. Some of its contents are fascinating and simultaneously amusing. The latest item to be publicized is a 19th century advertisement for Dr. Seth Arnold’s Cough Killer. Apparently “it works like magic” and is priced right at $0.25. A steal compared to today’s offering that run $9-12. What was the active ingredient in Dr. Seth Arnold’s concoction? Dr. Arnold was not required to list the ingredients on...
