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...
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...
The National Institute of Cancer has a digital library of photographs and illustrations called Visuals Online. The collection currently contains over 3,383 images. One specific collection is entitled NCI Cancer Close Up 2016. These images are microscopy-aided photos taken by cancer researchers at NCI’s various cancer centers throughout the country. NCI asked researchers to submit the photos that were taken as part of their research studies. At last count their were 85 photos showing an array of cancer cells such...
What is “Health Literacy”? There is no definitive definition of health literacy. “The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” is one example definition. The National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy reports that “nearly 9 out of 10 adults have difficulty using the everyday health information that is routinely available in our health care facilities, retail outlets, media, and communities”. There are many...
Tyler Vigen manages a humorous website entitled Spurious Correlations. He mines research data from datasets, finds data with similar trends, and creates a chart graphing that data. The result is a “spurious correlation”. The charts do not imply causation, but rather they are an entertaining visualization of statistics and data manipulation. Examples of his spurious correlations include: number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with films Nicholas Cage appeared in per capita cheese consumption correlates...
H1N1, Ebola, SARS … all are examples of epidemics / pandemics within the last fifteen years. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) was the first pandemic of the 21st century. It killed 774 people in 26 countries. Ebola is the most recent epidemic of the 21st century. There have been 11,283 reported deaths, according the World Health Organization. The ultimate pandemic however was the “Spanish” flu of 1918. Total deaths were estimated at about 50 million with some counts as high...
The National Library of Medicine has provided online access to the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. The papyrus was discovered in Egypt by American archeologist Edwin Smith in the 1860′s. The text is thought to have been created around 1600 BC. Written in Ancient Egyptian hieratic script, the papyrus contains 48 cases of wounds and trauma and offers a detailed description of the injuries, diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments. The original papyrus currently resides at the Library of the New York Academy...
Did you know that the Khan Academy has an NCLEX-RN Test prep section? According the the Khan Academy website, the content has been “created under the direction of Khan Academy and has been reviewed under the direction of the the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN).” Content is organized by body systems, then into subsets within each system, then into individual lessons. For example, the Circulatory Systems Diseases section contains the following among its listings: cardiac dysrhythmias and tachycardias...
