Caitlin Meyer's blog

Are you looking to brush up on your basic literature searching skills? Trying to use PubMed or EndNote and encountering difficulties? Need to set up SciENcv? Our fall workshop calendar has everything you may need and more for a productive fall term. Read on for details or head straight to the class calendar. In addition to weekly PubMed and EndNote classes, here are some of the classes coming up this fall that any member of the Yale community is welcome to register for and attend:  Basic Library Classes  Free resources and support in support of research  Second Tuesdays at noon Have you ever wondered what services and resources the library provides to help you with your research? In just 20 minutes, you’ll learn about first-class bioinformatics software, specialized databases, support for grant compliance, systematic review searching, statistics consultants, and more! Academic Job Search Series at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is excited to participate in this year’s Academic Job Search Series in partnership with the Office of Career Strategy, the Center for Teaching & Learning, and the Graduate Writing Lab.  Tools for Keeping Current & Staying Organized October 4th Expand your toolkit for keeping current with the literature in your field and staying organized during the job search process. This session will cover: setting email alerts in various databases, setting up EndNote as a personal database, and using Trello to track job applications throughout the process. My Bibliography and SciENcv: grant reporting, compliance, and biosketch through MyNCBI October 11th Learn how to create a MyNCBI account and link it to eRA Commons, delegate your account, populate and manage My Bibliography, learn how to use SciENcv to create multiple biosketches, create an ORCID, and more! Special Topic Classes Excel 1 & Excel 2 September 18 & October 4 In part one, refresh your basic Excel skills and move onto some intermediate topics such as formatting spreadsheets, sorting, filters, text-to-columns, combing data, and trimming. In part two, learn advanced functionality such as IF, COUNTIF, VLOOKUP, pivot tables, and conditional formatting. Creating Surveys with Qualtrics September 20 Qualtrics is a web-based tool provided by Yale ITS to create surveys. This hands-on class will prepare you to create your own online survey using the Qualtrics user-friendly interface. By the end of the class you will be able to: create a survey with multiple question types, distribute the survey in various ways, and view/analyze results. 

Welcome to 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 Ingenuity Variant Analysis (IVA). IVA is a web-based tool that combines analytical tools and content from the Ingenuity Knowledge Base to help identify disease variants in human sequencing data.  The product allows you to select multiple samples to analyze together. From there, you can design the forthcoming analysis and add any relevant biological terms to help narrow down the list of variants likely contributing to the disease or phenotype at hand. IVA supports a range of upload formats, including Variant Call Format (VCF), Genome Variation Format (GVF) and Complete Genomics files (Var, MasterVar, High confidence junction, etc.).  After you have set up your data, IVA lets you interact with the data with a series of customizable filters. Some of the filter types include: biological context, genetic analysis, predicted deleterious, cancer driver, pharmacogenetics, and more.  Keep an eye on the library’s class calendar for trainings on IVA and all bioinformatics-related software. In the meantime, Qiagen, the company that produces IVA, has produced webinars, tutorials, and guides to help you get started.  Finally, please note that the library’s license to IVA is for academic and research use only.  Results may not be incorporated into a diagnostic product or service.  Request an IVA account. For questions on how to best use IVA, feel free to contact Rolando Garcia-Milian.

Despite the promise of tools like Quicksearch and the breadth of massive databases like Scopus, certain types of information simply cannot be found in one place. No need to fret, though! We've got you covered. This series of blog posts will serve as a home of recommended resources and searching tips for hard-to-find types of information. Have a suggestion for a subject? Shoot me an email!  Conference proceedings – the collections of papers and/or abstracts that are presented at conferences – may be published in book format, as special issues of a journal, or as a serial.  Sometimes they are in the format of an abstract, sometimes in the form of a ‘conference paper’. A conference paper may morph into a journal article (usually with substantial additional material) but not always. If a conference abstract is found, then further sleuthing is required to see if the organization supporting the conference published proceedings or stopped at abstracts only. You might do an author search in the following resources to see if the author followed up the conference abstract or paper with a full-length journal article: PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, or Google Scholar.  Last resort? Contact the author/researcher directly and ask! Recommended Resources Conference Proceedings Citation Index (Web of Science) Click on ‘More settings’ to restrict your search to specific conference proceedings citation indices or search the entire Web of Science Core Collection. Embase Limit to publication types: conference abstract, conference paper, or conference review.   ProceedingsFirst (OCLC) This is an index of worldwide conference proceedings – every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by the British Library Document Supply Centre. WorldCat  This ‘world catalog of publications’ is an excellent tool for finding conference proceedings. Search specific conference number and title (16th and “international AIDS conference”), limit by year(s): 1989 or 1990 or 1991 Tips & Tricks Associations usually publish abstracts from their Annual Convention in the association journal in the same issue or special supplement every year. Sometimes both the authors and the title will change when published as a full-length journal article. Make sure to search creatively and read carefully. Society, organization, and association websites frequently have information about their publications, including proceedings and annual meeting abstracts. Requesting conference proceedings through Interlibrary Loan may take longer than traditional requests. It may only ever be available as an abstract (see second bullet point).

Despite the promise of tools like Quicksearch and the breadth of massive databases like Scopus, certain types of information simply cannot be found in one place. No need to fret, though! We've got you covered. This new series of blog posts will serve as a home of recommended resources and searching tips for hard-to-find types of information. Have a suggestion for a subject? Shoot me an email!  Despite being the primary site of scholarly conversation in the sciences, not all disciplines revolve around the journal literature. Often considered "book-based" disciplines include archeology, law, politics/international studies, psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, communications, and media studies. Book chapters are generally cited less than journal articles and there isn't as established of a culture of research impact measurement around book chapters as there is around journal articles. Book chapters are still valuable pieces of academic writing, however, as they provide a home to content that doesn't fit well into the article format. Finding book chapters using electronic resources can be a little bit tricky, as the tools are scattered, but read on for specific tips, tricks, and resources to try out.  Recommended Resources Scopus  After a massive book expansion project completed a few years ago, Scopus is now home to more than 150,000 books. As with the rest of Scopus' massive collection, the books cover a wide range of disciplines. You can limit searches to "Book Chapter" to filter the results as you wish by using the "Document Type" search facet.   ProQuest E-Book Central  ProQuest Ebook Central is a great interdisciplinary resource for finding book chapters, covering Science, Medicine, Social Science, Humanities, and Arts. Enter your search terms and then you can switch to "Chapter Results", which will exclude book titles that met your criteria.   Web of Science  Similar to Scopus, Web of Science is a large interdisciplinary resource that has recently undergone a big book project. Whereas in Scopus you can limit on the front end of your search, Web of Science lets you set a preference for document type after you search.   Google Scholar  If you're looking for a book chapter and you know the title, Google Scholar might be worth a shot. Since it doesn't have any search limiting functionality for chapters, it isn't as good of a resource for pulling chapters on a topic to browse.   Medical Library E-Library  This tool assembled by the medical library allows you to search for e-books and enables browsing books by publisher and subject. It doesn't offer limiting or searching for chapter functionality, but could be useful for browsing.   PsycInfo  Produced by the American Psychological Association, PsycInfo is home to all of the publications from the group. Book chapters are readily available, and the subject matter touches on the psychological aspects of many disciplines. Tips & Tricks    If searching for the title of a book chapter, mark it as a "Keyword" or "All Fields" search instead of "Title". If you mark it as "Title", you might miss out if we have the whole book your chapter is in but it isn't entirely indexed. If you know the name of the book the chapter is in, try using Quicksearch to locate the book and navigate to the chapter that way.  Tools like Scopus have robust author profile systems. Try to search for the author of the chapter, click on their name, then all of their publications (hopefully the chapter you seek) will populate.  If the Yale libraries do not own the chapter, you can request a scan or delivery of the book through interlibrary loan. 

Welcome to 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 the Incidence & Prevalence Database (IPD). Made available by Clarivate Analytics, IPD is a compendium of global epidemiological data from hundreds of sources. The collection of data is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of your research topic - whether that be incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality, trends, cost, risk-factors, or disease classifications.  The sources integrated into IPD include government reports, medical journals, market investment reports, medical and scientific associations, national and international healthcare surveys, trade journals, database audits, and industry contacts. The website is updated monthly with new information and government statistics are typically updated annually.  In addition to the data sets procured from sources mentioned above, IPD also features:  Hundreds of “Article Reviews”, where expert analysts condense information into digestible pieces “IPD Summaries”, tables of worldwide and regional incidence and prevalence data  A self-produced “Global Incidence and Prevalence Report with Map” Information on U.S. patient discharges IPD offers some advanced searching functionality that allows users to search by countries or regions, by certain publication criteria (author, title, date), by ICD Code, or by their controlled vocabulary of keywords.  The Incidence & Prevalence Database may be useful to those involved in clinical research, public health, market research, product development, business development, and more.  Start exploring the Incidence & Prevalence Database today! For questions on how to best use IDP, feel free to contact Public Health Librarian Kate Nyhan.