Congratulations to Professor Mary Corcoran of the Clinical Research and Leadership Deparment for submitting the first poster to GWUMC Research Commons! The poster "Caregiving Styles: A Typology of Cognitive and Behavioral Processes Associated with Caring for a Family Member with Dementia" is now posted and available to the research community.

Interested in learning more or submitting items? Visit the GWUMC Research Commons page on Himmelfarb Library's website.

A Virtual Genetics Journal Club has been launched by Dr. Charles Macri for GWUMC faculty, fellows, residents, and students interested in genetics. The journal club will exist online where a new article from the Himmelfarb Library's online journal collection will be posted monthly or more frequently in cases of exciting advancements in the field. Dr. Macri will select each article and moderate the online discussion, as needed.

Readers interested in genetics may also want to access these resources from GWUMC and the Himmelfarb Library collection:

• GWUMC Genetics - Current, Basic & Advanced Information about Genetics
• Genetics, health care, and public policy : an introduction to public health genetics (0-521-52907-7, 978-0-521-52907-5), Stewart, Alison.
• Genes and Disease
• OMIM - Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man

If you have questions about the Virtual Genetics Journal Club please email gwu.genetics@gmail.com.

Need help with your research? RefWorks can help you track, store, and organize citations that are useful to your research, and format in-text citations and the bibliography in your papers and grant proposal.

RefWorks is a citation management tool offered by Himmelfarb Library. Using RefWorks, you can create a private, customized library of citations including journal articles, books and book chapters, reports, websites, etc. Because RefWorks functions as a personal system, you can organize your citations in any way that makes sense to you, thereby making RefWorks into a personal digital repository.

Getting citations into RefWorks is easy and in most cases does not require you to type or copy/paste individual citations. You can import citations automatically from research articles databases (e.g. PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, etc.) and from the Library Catalog. To import citations for webpages, you can take advantage of RefWorks' RefGrab It tool which will capture citation data (e.g. title, author, web address) from the website and import it into RefWorks. You can download RefGrab It from the Tools menu in RefWorks.

Once you start adding citations to your RefWorks account, you can organize them according to your preferences. RefWorks allows you to create folders so you can organize your citations by topic or project. RefWorks also provides two options for connecting your citations to the full-text copies of articles. In RefWorks, each citation is automatically assigned a 'Find It' link which will search Himmelfarb Library's full-text collection for a full-text copy of the article. Alternately, you may choose to attach PDF's to individual citations.

When it comes time to create a bibliography, RefWorks can assist you by generating a bibliography in any of hundreds of available citation styles. You can choose a commonly used style (e.g. APA, Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, etc.), or one specifically designed for a journal (e.g. Journal of Neurosurgery, Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, etc.). RefWorks will create a bibliography instantly from within RefWorks, or if you would also like to create in-text citations you can take advantage of the Write-N-Cite tool. Write-N-Cite works with Word to add the citations within your document, and to format them along with the final bibliography in the bibliographic style that you select. You can download Write-N-Cite It from the Tools menu in RefWorks.

To get started with RefWorks, simply access the resource and then select 'Sign up for an Individual Account'. If you have questions about RefWorks, please ask us, or consult these resource materials:

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

GWUMC authors can obtain a 10% discount on publication charges when they publish their research in a Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal. Himmelfarb Library's institutional membership to PLoS provides this discount for the use of faculty, students, and staff, and also supports open access to the scientific literature.

Public Library of Science is a non-profit organization which publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific journals. PLoS counts among its publications PLoS Medicine, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS' goals are to:

• Provide free access to the world's scientific research.
• "Facilitate research, informed medical practice, and education" through open access.
• "Enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world's treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries."

By submitting your research article to a PLoS journal, you can take benefit from PLoS' mission and organization:

• Open access to journal articles means that anyone can read, redistribute and reuse your research (with correct attribution) without cost. You will retain copyright ownership of your own research article through a Creative Commons Attribution License.
• High-profile experts from around the world serve on PLoS' Advisory Board, Editorial Board (Section Editors & Academic Editors), and as Statistical Advisors.
• PLoS is exploring new ways of for researchers to communicate with one another by incorporating tools to allow users to rate, annotate, and discuss research articles.
• PLoS research articles are regularly highlighted in news sources including the New York Times, Reuters, and BBC which can generate publicity for your research.
• PLoS will help you comply with funders' public access policies (including the NIH) by immediately providing a copy of your research article to PubMed Central upon publication.

For more information on publishing in a Public Library of Science journal, please consult:

• FAQ: Open Access Publishing
• FAQ: Questions About Publication Fees
• PLoS Open Access License

GWUMC faculty, staff, and students can obtain a 15% discount on the Article Processing Charge (APC) when publishing in BioMed Central journals. Himmelfarb Library's institutional membership to BioMed Central, a publisher which supports open access to the biomedical literature, provides this discount.

BioMed Central publishes more than 200 peer-reviewed biomedical journals. For all of its journals, BioMed Central provides open access to all research articles. Selected BioMed Central journals are subscription-based; these journal provide open access to research articles and subscription access to review articles.

BioMed Central also allows the authors to retain the copyright to their own work by licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This license permits authors and others to re-use and re-distribute the articles without any restrictions as long as the paper is accurately cited. The increased accessibility to research articles can allow more people to read available research articles and may also increase citations to research articles.

For more information on publishing in BioMed Central, please consult:

• Information for Authors
• FAQ: Article-Processing Charges
• Peer-Review Policy
• GWUMC authors in BioMed Central

The GWUMC Faculty Publications database tracks publications by GWUMC faculty and compiles these citations into an annual report. The report can be accessed by individual year and is arranged by department.

Citations are automatically retrieved from databases such as MEDLINE/PubMed. Faculty members can also add additional citations to the database. Full instructions on how to do this are on the Library website.

The Faculty Publications database includes references for research carried out during your time here at GWUMC. New references will appear in the live database after approval by the librarian who moderates the database. The database is moderated at least twice a year.

To obtain a username and password to add references to the database, please contact Paul Levett at mlbprl@gwumc.edu.

GWUMC's Dr. Valerie Hu is the lead author on three recently-published articles on the genetics of autism. Dr. Hu is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Her research interests focus on a systems biology approach to diagnosis, understanding, and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.

In Gene expression profiling of lymphoblasts from autistic and nonaffected sib pairs: Altered pathways in neuronal development and steroid biosynthesis, Dr. Hu describes a research project which compared cell lines from sibling pairs in which one sibling is affected by autism and the other sibling is not. Using DNA microarray analyses, Dr. Hu identified differences in the biochemical and signaling pathways which may help determine the pathogenesis of autism.

Dr. Hu examined an issue related to the heterogeneity of autism in the paper Novel clustering of items from the autism diagnostic interview-revised to define phenotypes within autism spectrum disorders. In this paper, Dr. Hu describes how she and her colleagues used data from an autism diagnosis instrument in order to identify relevant genetic data. The diagnostic information and the genetic data of nearly 2,000 individuals were used to identify sub-groups for which gene expression analysis can be conducted.

In another article, Gene expression profiling differentiates autism case-controls and phenotypic variants of autism spectrum disorders: Evidence for circadian rhythm dysfunction in severe autism, Dr. Hu and her colleagues compared the clinical presentation of autism with gene expression data. In this study, individuals were divided into sub-groups according to the severity of autism. By linking genetic data with the severity of autism, Dr. Hu was able to identify genes which were expressed across the sub-groups as well as genes which were expressed in specific sub-groups.

References

• Hu, V. W., Nguyen, A. T., Kim, K. S., Steinberg, M. E., Sarachana, T., Scully, M. A., et al. (2009). Gene expression profiling of lymphoblasts from autistic and nonaffected sib pairs: Altered pathways in neuronal development and steroid biosynthesis. PLoS ONE, 4(6).
• Hu, V. W., & Steinberg, M. E. (2009). Novel clustering of items from the autism diagnostic interview-revised to define phenotypes within autism spectrum disorders. Autism Research, 2(2), 67-77.
• Hu, V. W., Sarachana, T., Kyung, S. K., Nguyen, A., Kulkarni, S., Steinberg, M. E., et al. (2009). Gene expression profiling differentiates autism case-controls and phenotypic variants of autism spectrum disorders: Evidence for circadian rhythm dysfunction in severe autism. Autism Research, 2(2), 78-97.

The GWUMC Faculty Publications database tracks publications by Medical Center faculty and compiles these citations into an annual report. The report can be accessed by individual year and is organized by department.

Citations are automatically retrieved from databases such as MEDLINE/PubMed and collected by the Library's Acquisitions Department. Faculty members can also add additional citations to the database.

Beginning in the summer of 2008, the faculty publications database will be open for editing and adding citations year-round. As always, new references will not appear in the database until they have been approved by the librarian responsible for moderating the database. The database will be moderated at least twice a year.

If you have any questions about the process, or if you want to obtain a username and password to add references to the database, please contact Paul Levett at mlbprl@gwumc.edu.

You can read more about the NIH Public Access policy, and learn how the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library can help you to comply with this policy on Himmelfarb Library's Research & Publishing Portal, or by going directly to Himmelfarb Library's NIH Public Access policy webpage.