“Is that a psychedelic light show?”

This question begins a Washington Post article about a patient’s experience with a detached retina. The patient and author of the piece, Bob Guldin, saw odd flashes of light and floaters before first seeking medical care. After seeing what appeared to be a curtain rising across his field of vision, he sought care at the George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates where he was seen by Dr. Fadi Nasrallah. Diagnosed at 1 p.m., his surgery occurred at 6 p.m. and the patient was home by 10 p.m.

You can learn more about the patient’s condition and treatment from Himmelfarb Library’s online and print collections:

• Retinal Detachment in FirstConsult/MDConsult; Brief, evidence-based information including diagnosis, treatment, outcomes, and prevention.
• Gariano RF, Kim CH. Evaluation and management of suspected retinal detachment. Am Fam Physician 2004;69:1691-8
• Retina / editor-in-chief, Stephen J. Ryan. Stacks RE551 .R43 2006 V 1
  • Volume 3 Surgical Retina, Section 2 Retinal Reattachments: Surgical Principles and Technicques
  • This book is part of a three volume set of which one or all can be checked out of Himmelfarb Library.

Image from: A.D.A.M., Inc. (2008). Detached Retina. [Online image]. Retrieved June 4, 2008 from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/9931.htm.

The Guide to Good Clinical Practice can be a valuable reference if you’re working on a clinical trial for new drugs, devices or biologics or are researching the clinical trials’ process and regulations. The Guide to Good Clinical Practice includes:

• Explanations of laws, federal regulations, and international harmonization efforts
• Sample checklists for conducting quality assurance audits
• FDA forms, compliance guides, and informational charts
• Industry guidance documents and information sheets
• Analyses of accepted good clinical practices
• Newsletters with key updates and analysis
• Clinlaw, an online database of state and federal clinical trial requirements

The FDA forms, compliance guides, and organizational charts are located under the Additional Resources tab on the main page along with Clinlaw, Guidance Documents, court cases, and other resources. The online Guide to Good Clinical Practice is a very current and comprehensive resource. You can locate specific information by:

• Using the search box to find information within the Guide, newsletters or selected Federal regulations or statutes or
• Navigating to any page in the database using the full table of contents on the left side of the screen

The Guide to Good Clinical Practice is available from both our E-Texts and E-Databases pages. Off-campus access is available through the VPN/GWireless or ALADIN. If you have questions regarding off-campus access, please consult the online instructions or contact the Reference Desk via phone (202-994-8570), email (library@gwumc.edu), or Instant Message.

RefWorks, the online citation management tool offered by Himmelfarb Library, recently debuted several enhancements which can make your life as a writer and researcher easier:

• Use Write-n-Cite offline. This plug-in, Write-N-Cite III for Windows, allows you to format (and unformat) your citations without being connected to the Internet.
• Write-N-Cite for Mac version 2.5 now available. This Mac-friendly version of works with Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac and the Leopard operating system.
• Attach full-text articles to your citations. RefWorks users receive 100 MB of default storage space and can use this to attach PDFs (or other documents) to individual citations.

For additional information on RefWorks including how to harness these new features, please consult:

• RefWorks Tutorials
• RefWorks Q and A (pdf 32K)
• RefWorks Quick Start Guide (pdf 2.42MB)

As always, if you have questions or need assistance, please contact us via phone (202-994-8570), email (library@gwumc.edu), or Instant Message.

If you know the answer and maybe even if you don't, you may want to take the new interactive Stretch Your Brain quiz available from MDConsult.

This medical terminology quiz offers four levels where you can test your knowledge and compete to be the high scorer of the day.

Image from: National Institutes of Health (2007). Tracking Neural Progenitor Cells in the Human Brain. [Online image]. Retrieved May 7, 2008 from http://www.nih.gov/news/research_matters/november2007/11192007brain.htm.

The faculty publications database will be unavailable on Wednesday April 30 from 8.00am until 12.00pm. This is due to maintenance to update the host server of the system. Service will resume in the afternoon on April 30, 2008. We regret any inconvienience this may cause.

The POPLINE database recently added ‘abortion’ to its list of stop words which are words that the database’s search query ignores. Terms like ‘a’, ‘of’, and ‘the’ are commonly on stop word lists, and these common terms are filtered because they do not generally add to the meaning of a query and because they occur so commonly that results for these terms are overwhelming.

So, what does it mean that abortion is a stop word in POPLINE? If you execute a basic search for this term, you’ll see a screen that says “No records found by latest query.” Before abortion was added to the stop words list, users could locate thousands of articles mentioning abortion in different contexts. Several workarounds have been suggested, but these will be useful primarily to advanced searchers who already know that the term abortion can’t be used in POPLINE.

POPLINE provides international coverage of population, family planning, and related health issues. The database is freely available on the Internet and is produced by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). POPLINE primarily covers the time period of 1970 through the present, but also provides selected citations back to 1827.

We’re soliciting comments from the GWUMC community on this news:

• What does this mean to you?
• Does this affect the usability or usefulness of POPLINE?
• Should Himmelfarb Library continue to link to POPLINE?

Unfortunately, access to the OSH-ROM database will cease effective Friday, March 28, 2008. OSH-ROM was available for access to databases covering international occupational health and safety information.

If your research interests include topics in occupational health and safety and environmental medicine, we do recommend some alterative databases: MEDLINE (or PubMed), Scopus, Haz-Map, and TOXNET.

We regret the lack of notice on this issue. If you have comments or questions, please contact Laura Abate, Electronic Resources & Instructional Librarian, at 202-994-8570 or mlblea@gwumc.edu.

Scopus and ScienceDirect can now be used with a social bookmarking service, 2collab.com, allowing you to bookmark and comment on specific articles. Your bookmarks and comments can be kept private, or can be shared with other individuals or with specific groups.

How does it work?

Each article in Scopus and ScienceDirect links to the 2collab.com website. Click on the link to bookmark the article and/or comment on it. You can set your preferences to specify which groups (if any) you join, and who else (specific groups or general public) can see your bookmarks and citations.

To get started with, follow these simple steps:

1. Create a personal account on 2collab.com.
2. Click on the bookmarking icon by articles in Scopus or ScienceDirect.
   
3. Login to your 2collab.com account (if necessary).
4. Select your preferences regarding if you would like to share the article with others (e.g. make public) and which groups (if any) you would like to share.

Why use social bookmarking or 2collab.com?

While you can use 2collab.com to simply keep track of articles that interest you, its greater strength is as a collaborative tool that allows you to share and comment on research that is useful to you and your colleagues, and to learn about other research articles from similarly interested individuals. 2collab.com allows you to create and join interest groups, to learn about articles that were interesting to others in your field, and to share your comments and read comments from others.

The Cochrane Collaboration is a highly regarded independent organization that conducts systematic reviews of healthcare interventions to provide evidence for clinical decisions. Now they offer audio summaries of their reviews that you can listen to from your computer, or by downloading the mp3 file to your portable player or subscribing to the podcast. The audio summaries generally consist of discussion by the review's authors and are a few minutes in length.

Himmelfarb offers the complete Cochrane reviews through OVID/MEDLINE and directly from the Cochrane Library, but we wanted to highlight the audio summaries available from the Cochrane Collaboration. Either format will help you learn about the latest information in treating and diagnosing specific conditions and improve your understanding of medical evidence and how it's used to reach conclusions.

Recent audio summaries include:

• Hawthorn extract for treating chronic heart failure
• Cranberries for preventing urinary tract infections
• Infection control strategies for preventing the transmission of MRSA in nursing homes for older people

While RefWorks is designed to create in-text citations plus a bibliography at the end of a paper, it can also be used to create footnotes. To get this to work, use your word processing software’s footnotes feature to insert the footnote where you want it in the paper, and then use RefWorks Write-N-Cite feature to place the citation in the footnote.

Here are the steps to insert a citation in a footnote:

1. Create the footnote from within your word processor. For example, in Microsoft Word 2003 (as is available on the public terminals in Himmelfarb Library), use the Insert menu to select Reference / Footnote.
   
   
2. Microsoft Word 2003 will insert the in-text number for your footnote and automatically place the cursor in the footnote area at the bottom of the page. You can use RefWorks’ Write-N-Cite feature to insert the appropriate citation(s) in the footnote.
   
   
3. When you’re ready to format your document and change the raw RefWorks citations (in the curly brackets, e.g. {{825 Afshar,K. 2005; }} )to properly formatted citations, choose ‘Bibliography’ in RefWorks Write-N-Cite tool and select the citation style that you’d like to use. Be sure that you use a citation style that will support footnotes; in general, citation styles that are marked “Notes Only” or “In-Text Citations and Notes” (e.g. Chicago 15th ed. Notes & Bibliography or MLA 6th Edition) will work while those marked “In-Text Citations Only” won’t.

Additional information on this topic is available at:

• RefWorks Working With Footnotes And Endnotes
• RefWorks Modifying an In-Text Citation or Footnote