TML News and Notes: August 2009

Click on the dates for more information and to register:

Tuesday, September 1: Part I
Tuesday, September 8: Part II
Monday, October 12: Part I
Monday, October 19: Part II
Tuesday, November 10: Part I
Tuesday, November 17: Part II

Pediatric Care Online, developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), provides quick access to many different pediatric resources from your desktop or mobile device. A keyword search will show results from the integrated reference library, practice guidelines, patient handouts and other clinical tools. Content includes:

• Point-of-Care Quick Reference - Over 240 select topics taken from the AAP Textbook of Pediatric Care outlined for quick retrieval of information


• The new AAP Textbook of Pediatric Care - Over 3000 pages of detailed information and recommendations


• Bright Futures - Comprehensive health supervision guidelines to help make the most of well-child visits


• Red Book Content- Detailed information from the AAP Red Book on over 200 childhood infectious diseases


• Interactive Periodicity Schedule - Interactive chart providing preventive screening and recommended actions for each well-child visit


• Signs & Symptoms Search - Quickly suggests diagnoses based on selected signs and symptoms


• Patient Handouts - Hundreds of patient handouts with easy to read explanations for many conditions and procedures


• Forms & Tools - Resources to help screen, track, and record clinical information

Pediatric Care Online is available to VCU affiliates from the VCU Libraries list of Databases A-Z. For off-campus access, login with your VCU eID and password. In addition to access via the web, select content can be downloaded to handheld devices and smartphones such as iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile devices. This resource is provided by the VCU School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics in partnership with the VCU Libraries.

PubMed is one of the most heavily used search tools in the health sciences fields, and if you're anything like me, you stumble across articles all the time that you want to send to your friends and colleagues. But PubMed doesn't make it that easy for you to create a link that's easy to share. Depending on how you got to an article's result page, your web browser's location bar can show you either a massive, unwieldy link, or one that won't even lead to your article.

A URL shortening service called pmid.us can make quick work of linking to articles you find, with just one tiny piece of information: the article's PMID, a unique number assigned to every citation. You'll find the PMID of an article somewhere in every view of a search result. It's at the bottom of the abstract in the default AbstractPlus view, shown here:

Just copy the PMID to your clipboard, and paste it after http://pmid.us/ to form a link that will lead immediately to the PubMed abstract for the article. No muss, no fuss, and it'll fit easily in an e-mail or tweet.

pmid.us has some a few other tricks up its sleeve in addition to linking to a single abstract. You can also link to:

* multiple abstracts, by putting a plus sign between the PMIDs.
ex: http://pmid.us/2676911+6189501+10221304

* a full-text article, by adding full: before the PMID.
ex: http://pmid.us/full:10221304

* a list of related articles, by adding rel: before the PMID.
ex: http://pmid.us/rel:10221304

NCBI's Help Manual lists a native method of linking in to results which has a few more features up its sleeve, but is also more complicated to work with. The native method is clearly more powerful for linking to searches, but for a simple abstract or related article list, pmid.us will do the job very nicely.

Have you tried out pmid.us to make better URLs? Know a better way to link in to abstracts? Drop it in the comments and let us know.

- Andrew Bain

Learn about the variety of resources and services available to you from the VCU Libraries. In these one hour sessions we'll show you the most effective ways to find books, journals, and other information for research and provide an orientation to the Tompkins-McCaw Library and its services as well as offer a tour of the facility for employees and students. Tours will begin at the Service Desk, 1st floor, Tompkins-McCaw Library, 509 N. 12th St.

Click on the following dates for more information and to register:

Monday, August 24, 2009 from 3:00 - 4:00 pm
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 from 9:00 - 10:00 am
Thursday, October 1, 2009 from 3:00 to 4:00 pm
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 from 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Friday, November 6, 2009 from 9:00 - 1-:00 am
Monday, November 16, 2009 from 2:00 - 3:00 pm
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 from 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

The Psychiatry Legacy Collection is the journal backfile project of American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. This collection covers more than a century of psychiatry through six respected, peer-reviewed journals. The collection dates back to 1844 and includes The American Journal of Psychiatry, the oldest continuously published medical specialty journal in the United States. VCU students, faculty and staff can access the individual titles through the VCU Libraries Catalog or the Journal Finder.

Titles in the Psychiatry Legacy Collection, along with dates of coverage, include:

• Academic Psychiatry, 1989 - 1996
• The American Journal of Psychiatry, 1844 - 1996
• Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 1989 - 1996
• Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 1992 - 1996
• Psychiatric Services, 1950 - 1996
• Psychosomatics, 1960 - 1996

VCU Libraries now provides access to the online Encyclopedia of Healthcare Information Systems from IGI Global. This online work provides an extensive compilation of international research on the use, adoption, design and diffusion of information communication technologies in healthcare. Topics covered include computerized medical records, patient safety, economic implications, medical information security, physician-patient communication, telehealth, and much more. There are over 170 chapters written by leading experts from around the world. Each entry includes an overview, highlights of recent trends and advancements, tables, figures, references, and a list of key terms. Bibliographic information at the chapter level can be imported into RefWorks. Basic and advanced searching is available, as is a keyword index.

Consult the Encyclopedia of Healthcare Information Systems for comprehensive, authoritative coverage and information pertinent to healthcare information systems.