Research First Aid – Equipment Loan Program

In this episode of Research First Aid, you will learn about the exciting possibilities available through the Laupus and Joyner Library equipment loan programs.

Real Halloween Research

Halloween is right around the corner, so this week we are going to introduce you to a little bit of health sciences research fun. NCBI ROFL, according to it’s creators “is the brainchild of two Molecular and Cell Biology graduate students at UC Berkeley. Like most grad students, we procrastinate a lot.” The authors of the site look for actual citations in PubMed that deal with funny subjects, however they do give the disclaimer that the site “is not meant to denigrate science or NCBI in any way. It is purely for entertainment. [They] are scientists [themselves] and [...] firmly believe in science’s value to society and its importance for expanding the boundaries of human knowledge.” This week they are highlighting different Halloween related research, but I wanted to share an entry that came out about a month ago that I found particularly fun. This research could be very useful if you are trying to avoid vampires or if you are a Twilight fan hoping to meet one.

Does Garlic Prevent Against Vampires? A Research Study

Have a safe and fun Halloween!

Research First Aid – e-Books

Many people don’t realize that ECU libraries have subscriptions to thousands of e-books. In this episode of Research First Aid, Amy and Mark talk a little bit about the types of e-books available and how to find them.

Research First Aid – Research Consultations

In this episode, Amy and Mark talk about free research consultations for students, faculty, and staff at ECU.

HealthDay TV

MedlinePlus launched HealthDay TV in early September. It’s a new multimedia feature for the health news section of the Web site. The HealthDay TV videos are only available on the English version of MedlinePlus, but cover timely health topics and are geared to health consumers, but still relevant to health professionals and students. I was particularly happy to see that they do a recap of the week’s news in video format every Saturday. This is great for those of us that like to stay in the loop, but sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of information coming at us.

Please visit the MedlinePlus News page to see the new video content.

Research First Aid – Ask a Librarian

In this episode, Mark and Amy talk about the convenient Ask a Librarian services offered through Joyner and Laupus.

Ghost Writers and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals

In the not so distant past, we told you about Merck paying Elsevier to publish phony journals. Well, now, there is a new reason to be a little more skeptical about what you read in medical journals.  Apparently, Wyeth pharmaceuticals paid ghost writers to write 26 articles (mostly review) which were published in 18 different journals  supporting the use of their homorne replacement therapies from 1998 through 2005.  Sales for these pharmaceuticals soared as many women were placed on these drugs due to downplayed side effects and exagerrated benefits.

 In 2002, a large federal study was cancelled when it became apparent that these same hormone treatments were correlated to increased breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study even showed that the treatments were also linked to increased dementia in elderly patients.

 Unfortunately, it appears that Wyeth is not the only pharmaceutical company to use ghost writers to draft up articles supporting their treatments or to get physicians to sign their names to articles they may not have written completely (or even partially) themselves. 

 If you are interested in finding out more about this scandal, you can check out The New York Times or Stephen Colbert (for a funnier, if not less accurate depiction).  He doesn’t actually start talking about hormones until around 4:50, but it’s interesting to see how this phenomena has infiltrated the popular media.

Research First Aid – Welcome Back and Library Liaisons

 In this episode, Mark and Amy welcome everyone to a new semester and talk about the liaison programs at Laupus and Joyner Libraries. 

Update on Medical Applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch

Back in February, I wrote a piece called Medical Applications for iPhones and iPod Touches. Five months later, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the developments these applications have made as well as look for what’s new.

 I was inspired to revisit this topic because I found this great website called Timeline: The iPhone as Medical Tool. Apparently, it wasn’t until November of 2008 that Apple created a section for medical apps. By April of 2009, medical applications were the third fastest growing applications out of the 20 categories of Apple’s iTunes store.

Let’s start by just taking a look at the apps available for PubMed, one of the most well known interfaces to the Medline database.  Since I’ve already talked about some of them before, this entry will only focus on newly released apps.

 SemanticWeb–0.99–This tool is part of SemanticWeb, a project that claims to use artificial intelligence to search for life sciences information. The article tab on this app links to PubMed citations.

Papers–9.99–This application is one I have not tried out, but it is more a way to store articles and papers than a search engine. It does provide access for searching PubMed, Google Scholar, JStor and other databases. There have been mixed reviews as to it’s functionality.

PubMed on Tap Lite–Free–When I last talked about iPhone/iPod touch applications, this app was only available in a 2.99 version called PubMed on Tap. Now, they have a lite version which claims to have all the features of the original, but only returns 5 results per search. I’m not sure how they pick only 5 (date, relevancy, etc.), but it is a nice little app.  A search on Mirena pulled up 5 articles all from 2009 with 2 appearing to be on topic. They were not the same top 5 results as when I did the same search in PubMed.  I like that this app allows you to add the proxy URL for your institution so that you can access full text articles from journals your library subscribes to. I did have to talk with my IT person to tweak the proxy URL to get it to work, so you may want to ask your librarian for this information.

UCentral–Free with institutional subscription–UCentral contains Medline Journals which should allow you to create searches and recieve alerts for them. You will need to log into your UCentral account and then click on Medline Journals. From this point you can select the journals that you want to look at from their list and add them to “My Medline Journals.” The next time you open the app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you will need to update it before the journals will show up. I believe this is more of a table of contents service that will only show the most recent issues of these journals.  It’s still a nice way to access latest articles. 

These aren’t apps, but they are my new favorite tools for accessing PubMed from my iPhone. I’d love it if you would share your favorite ways to access PubMed from your iPhone or other mobile device in our comments section.

This is a search page for Pubmed that’s optimized to mobile devices.

http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/pubmed/index.html

This is a special PICO form optimized for searching Pubmed with a mobile device

http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/pico/piconew.html

And this is the homepage for both.

http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/nlmd/index.html 

Another app worth mentioning is…

Pocket First Aid and CPR–3.99–This first aid application has come out from the American Heart Association and was recently reviewed by the Washington Post. One of the features that I found interesting is that this app works a bit like a personal health record since it can store information about a person on it. The other feature I appreciated was that the information is stored on the phone, so a signal is not required to access information. 

On The Horizon

There has been a lot of talk online about how Apple is working to create more apps that can turn the iPhone into a monitoring device. You can see some talk of this in the following article Qualcomm SSLS: Wireless + Medicine and how the iPhone ties them together. 

There has also been some research on using Smart Phones as clinical tools in areas that are lacking quality medical centers, but do have access to cell phones.  Perhaps the iPhone and other similar products will help bring better care to underserved areas. Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications.

Medical Journals and Facebook

Apparently, medical journals are starting to find their way onto the social networking site, Facebook. According to the The Wired Campus, a blog put out by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the The New England Journal of Medicine has decided to create a facebook page as a new way to get closer to their users. What other journals can you find in Facebook? Well, Wired says JAMA has created a facebook page as well as Science.

 After reading the article in Wired, I decided to see for myself what sort of pages the journals were creating. I looked at pages for JAMA, AAS, and, of course, the New England Journal of Medicine. After looking at the JAMA Facebook page (look them up as “Journal of the American Medical Association”), I did not see a lot of value in the site. If you are on Facebook, you can become a fan, and maybe read about the journal, but that is all they have posted to date. Perhaps there is more to come later. As for Science magazine, all I could find for my searching efforts was a page for the company that produces the magazine, AAAS. The page did have a lot of interesting content, though.  The New England Journal of Medicine site is pretty sparse and comprable to JAMA’s page. Under info, you can find a link to the journal’s website and wikipedia, but not much else.

 I personally have not become a fan of any medical journals in Facebook.  I was a little disappointed by the lack of content on their sites, but I will keep an eye on them to see if additional content turns up later. It would be nice to friend a journal if you would get a feed of new articles that were being published or if they would send out notices of some of the new cool things they are doing on the web (like NEJM: Videos in Clinical Medicine).  When that happens, I’ll think more about becoming a fan or friending a journal.