Blogs

Welcome to our new series, Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection.  In this edition of Resource Spotlight, we’ll be looking at AccessMedicine. Produced by publisher McGraw-Hill, AccessMedicine is part of a robust family of resources including AccessAnesthesiology, AccessEmergency, AccessPediatrics, and AccessSurgery.  AccessMedicine is a great tool for students, residents, and faculty alike: Online access to more than 80 medical textbooks, such as Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, The Color Atlas of Family Medicine, and Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine Multimedia library with examination videos, patient safety modules, procedural videos, and more Exam preparation tools for board certification and Step 3 including Graber and Wilbur’s Family Medicine Examination & Board Review and large question banks with detailed answers Tools to help your practice such as the Pocket Guide to Diagnostic Tests, the differential diagnosis tool Diagnosaurus, and an integrated drug database in English and Spanish Patient education resources on thousands of topics in many languages AccessMedicine is available to Yale affiliates through the VPN, YNHH affiliates through the proxy server, and everybody on the YaleSecure WiFi network. For questions on how to best use AccessMedicine, feel free to contact Clinical Librarian Alexandria "Lexi" Brackett.

  When researchers consider where to submit an article, they often consider a journal’s impact factor.  The impact factor is a measure of the frequency an average article has been cited in a particular year. However, some journals, such as those not indexed by Thompson Reuters’ Journal Citation Report (JCR), or journals with less than three years of publication, will not have an impact factor.  Another option to view journal level impact is Scopus’s serials comparison tool lists the journals CiteScore, and various other journal metrics such as SNIP and SJR. In addition, Scopus can provide you with article-level information such as how many times an article has been cited by other articles.  You can access Scopus through the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library’s home page: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/ For more information on journal-level metrics of impact, check out this video tutorial. For a series of video tutorials related to this topic click here.

Cushing/Whitney Medical Library loves public health, and so we’re celebrating National Public Health Week with the American Public Health Association. In the first week of April, you can enjoy daily public health-themed literature workshops and daily social media postings of our favorite public health posters from the Medical Historical Library. But wait, there’s more! Are you part of APHA’s #1BillionSteps Challenge, encouraging everyone to do consistent physical activity? Would you like to get a few more steps in your day? We’ve got your back! During National Public Health Week, you can join the #1BillionSteps Challenge, Library Edition – right here at Yale. It’s easy and fun! Walk over to visit another library on campus. Take a selfie with something special there. Post your pictures on Instagram with hashtags – especially #SteppingOutAtYale You can win a healthy prize from the medical library! With five libraries to visit, maybe you should check out one every day! Use these hashtags and mentions to tell Instagram about your travels. 147 steps from LEPH to Cushing/Whitney Medical Library See how close we are? Pop over to the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and take a selfie with Harvey Cushing, our library founder, in the beautiful Medical Historical Library. Walk the long way, by Blue State and in the front of Sterling, to get more steps! And while you’re here, stop in and say hi to public health librarian Kate Nyhan. #SteppingOutAtYale @yalemedhistlib #HappyBirthdayHarvey #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth #litreviewpleasehelp 1056 steps to Robert B. Hass Family Arts Library Are you looking for a laugh? Visit the Robert B Hass Family Arts Library, where librarians Meredith Hale and Jae Rossman have created a special pop-up exhibition for National Public Health Week! Starting at 10AM on Monday, you can see historical sports imagery from the American Trading Card Collection and An Almanac of Twelve Sports. Look for it behind the glass of the special collections area downstairs, any time the library is open. Thanks @hassartslibrary for these #SpecialCollections! #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth 1478 steps to Lillian Goldman Law Library Do you need a giant rabbit in your life? Of course you do! Visit the Lillian Goldman Law Library and meet Pufendorf. Pufendorf is a symbol of resilience, having survived not only the 2003 Yale Law School bombing but also a kidnapping by 3L’s. Photography is normally forbidden in the law library, but you have a special dispensation for selfies with Pufendorf – if you can find him! Here’s how: Enter the law school from the Wall Street entrance. At the main staircase (right in the middle of the main hallway) go left and down into Library Level 2 (L2) which houses the computer lab, IT, the Rare Book Room, and Tech Services. There is another set of stairs on the left past the Rare Book Room. You’ll find Pufendorf at the base of the stairs. #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth #totemicdappledrabbit 1479 steps to Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Do you want to enjoy history, art, and rare memorabilia of the Harlem Renaissance? Visit the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Explore their rich exhibition “Gather Out of Star-Dust” – what will be your favorite part? The playful map of Harlem nightlife – go right from the entrance; it’s hung to make selfies irresistible The 1917 Silent Protest Parade – go left from the entrance Langston Hughes’s collection of rent party cards – second level behind the Cube. Art, photographs, and sheet music about dancing – all over! Check out the whole exhibit. You’ll love it! And pick up an exhibit pamphlet with a reproduction of the Harlem map, too. Thanks @beineckelibrary #HarlemRen #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth 1267 steps to Sterling Memorial Library Do you want to see the mother ship of Yale University Libraries? Visit Sterling Memorial Library and explore the beautiful nave. Check out the stained glass, and visit the Yale printing press. #SteppingOutAtYale @yalelibrary #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth You can be a winner! Everyone who participates in #SteppingOutAtYale and #1BillionSteps gets fresh air and exercise – and the winners will also get packets of vegetable seeds and local, sustainable maple syrup from the Yale Landscape Lab! All you have to do is post a library selfie on Instagram with the hashtag #SteppingOutAtYale. The more posts, the better your chances of winning a prize -- thank you @yalewestcampus #yalelandscapelab #maplefest2017 Get in touch Contact public health librarian Kate Nyhan with questions, comments,  boasts about how many steps you’ve taken, and complaints that these figures are off. Email kate.nyhan@yale.edu or click here to set up a meeting to talk about literature searching and more. Thank you Thanks to all the participating libraries and their staff, medical library colleagues, the Yale Sustainability Program and Landscape Lab, APHA, and the Medical Library Association’s Public Health/Health Administration section.  

Love Your Data week is coming! Libraries at Yale are celebrating this international event to help researchers take better care of their data.  #LoveYourData events at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Data Horror Stories -- Brown Bag Lunch, 2/13/2017Data Valentines -- 2/15/2017 On Tuesday you'll celebrated your loved ones; on Wednesday, you can celebrate your loved ones and zeroes! Create a Valentine to the dataset of your choice. Maybe you and your dataset have been growing together for many years, or maybe you're in the first flush of exploring your data's documentation and variables. If you love your data, tell us about it!  Cushing Center Tour: The Cushing Tumor Registry as a Live Dataset -- 2/17/2017 You may have seen the Cushing Center, with brains, photographs and more -- but have you heard the story of how the collection came to be, how some samples, photographs, and other metadata survived until the twenty-first century, and how researchers are still using these samples today? Join Cushing Center Coordinator Terry Dagradi and Research and Education Librarian Kate Nyhan to discuss the continuing life of this extraordinary collection -- and how lucky we are that the collection has survived intact for so long.  More #LoveYourData events at Yale Check out more events celebrating Love Your Data week! From a workshop on data documentation to an emulation station where you can try out a live demo of '90s games, there's something for everyone. Follow along with #LYD17 and #loveyourdata on Twitter, too! Want more information? Contact librarian Kate Nyhan, and check out Yale's guides to research data management and research data support.

Like other staff at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, I sometimes benefit from professional development support from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. With their generous support, I participated in #GL18, Leveraging Diversity in Grey Literature, at the New York Academy of Medicine. Some key themes: First, from the perspective of the researcher: keep an open mind about the types of documents that might be relevant, or even essential, to a research question. Perhaps you could mine the differences between transcripts and written testimony before Congressional committees, or maybe you’ll ingest community documents in every format to document bicycle policy. Thoughtful researchers are integrating new, non-traditional genres of evidence into their work. Medical librarians might not even be aware of the diverse types of grey literature that could be relevant to biomedical and public health questions – such as the governmental administrative materials that are generated by legislative, litigation, and regulatory processes; read “The Elephant in the Room”  by excellent speaker Taryn Rucinski of Pace University Law School for more details. Second, from the perspective of the disseminator: you can facilitate discovery through a combination of pleasant user experience design and interoperable metadata. At the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, at WorldWideScience.org, at NDLTD, this dual path to discoverability appeared again and again. Without good UX and high-quality, machine-readable medatadata, dissemination with be a challenge no matter how great (and free) your material is. Diversity was the stated theme of the conference, and to a degree the endless diversity of grey literature makes it hard to work with. How do I cite it? How do I evaluate it? How do I find it? It always depends. What GL18 has inspired me to do is to think more seriously, before starting to engage with grey literature on any topic, about what I expect I might find, how I can manage it, and how I will know when I’ve found what I need to. In this domain, I’ll admit that GL18 didn’t give me all the answers – but that’s ok, because now I know what the questions are. Thanks again to the New York Academy of Medicine for hosting this event, and to the National Network of Libraries of Medicine for funding my participation, and to all the contributors who shared their work at GL18.  Want more info on grey literature and public health? Contact Kate Nyhan, research and education librarian for public health.