Category: News

New for Bates’ Visual Guide to Physical Examination in 2022

In 2022, 27 new videos will be released that will be focusing on communication and interprofessional skills.  The content of these new videos will help educate students on the expanded coverage of communication skills that can be found on the USMLE Step 1.  The goal is to also train students in this discipline in order for them to become better at approaching holistic patient care and developing stronger patient relationships.

The Bates’ Visual Guide is a visual resource that provides users with head-to-toe and systems-based physical examination techniques for the Assessment or Introduction to Clinical Medicine.  There are 8 hours of video content available as well other useful content including:

    • Differential diagnosis, diagnostic considerations
    • Anatomy review
    • Sample digital write-ups of the physical examination findings
    • Options to share videos
    • PDF transcripts and close captioning’s

You can access Bates’ Visual via the IHS Library website.  The library subscription allows an unlimited number of users with access to the resource available off-campus from any device.

A complete list of video URLs can be accessed by clicking the below link.  For inquires about how to use or access this resource please email the IHS library at ihslibrary@shu.edu

https://batesvisualguide.com/DocumentLibrary/Bates/BatesVideoPersistentUrls.pdf

 – Kyle Downey    kyle.downey@shu.edu

Predatory Journals

Think. Check. Submit.

This organization helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications. “Think. Check. Submit.”  checklist has been developed by a coalition of scholarly publishing organizations. These criteria are useful for authors considering where to submit their work, but as with the other initiatives are not a failsafe to identify all legitimate scholarly journals.

Definition of Predatory Publishing

Predatory publishers or journals are those which charge authors a fee for publication with no intention of providing the expected services – such as editorial or peer review – in return. Charging a fee is a legitimate business model, but the publisher should be providing a good publishing service in return.  Authors, realizing that they have submitted their paper to a questionable publisher, can find they are charged a large fee if they want to withdraw their article.

Known synonyms for “predatory journals”

The concept of ‘predatory’ journals has many names: fake journals, questionable journals, illegitimate journals, deceptive journals, dark journals, and journals “operating in bad faith”.

Predatory or not?

There are many journals which do not have the best editorial or technical standards, but which are applying reasonable basic processes to their articles and operating in good faith. Some caution is therefore advised when considering a journal: defects in a publisher’s processes may lead to it being labelled as predatory but the journal may simply lack resources – there may not be an intention to deceive.

Things to watch out for

A predatory journal/publisher may display one or more of these characteristics:

  • A journal title which can be easily confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin, scope or association with other journals
  • Very wide scope
  • Displays of unofficial impact factors
  • False claims of being indexed in major services like PubMed or DOAJ
  • No publisher address or contact information
  • Unclear ownership of the journal
  • Spams researchers with many emails inviting submissions, often unrelated to expertise
  • Advertises very fast times from submission to publication
  • Publishes out-of-scope articles
  • Publishes nonsense articles
  • Poor or non-existent editing of articles (many spelling mistakes or very poor grammar)
  • Hides information on charges
  • No editorial board is listed, or the editorial board comprises dead or retired scholars or scholars who are not specialized in the topic
  • Lack of information on the policies of the journal, such as peer review, licensing and copyright

For further information please see: Think.Check.Submit.

Tips on Writing a Literature Review

Literature reviews are important resources for researchers. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its future trajectory. Creating them can provide inspiration for one’s own research, as well as some practice in writing. But few researchers are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Even picking the appropriate software to use can be an involved decision (see ‘Tools and techniques’). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03422-x

Tay, Andy. (December 4, 2020) How to write a superb literature review. Nature News . December 4, 2020   doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03422-x

What’s in a word? AMA launches language guide for medical professionals

In an attempt to advance equity in healthcare, the American Medical Association has developed a health equity guide, released Oct 28, 2021. The guidebook addresses language use best practices and critical thinking about health narratives, and provides a glossary of terms. 

The playbook, titled “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” was developed in partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice.

The guide was created to give physicians a common tongue with which to discuss issues pertaining to systemic inequality and educate them as to how these issues translate into a medical setting. It acknowledges the power of language and the potentially harmful underlying assumptions many common phrases and words hold. 

“We hope that this guide will stimulate critical thinking about language, narrative and concepts — helping readers to identify harmful phrasing in their own work and providing alternatives that move us toward racial justice and health equity,” the guide states. 

The guide covers three major focus areas: health equity language, why narratives matter and a glossary of key terms. Together, knowledge of the three areas can enable medical professionals to be intentional when discussing and thinking about inequity and reframe traditional narratives. For instance, the guide suggests alternatives for commonly used phrases, such as using “formerly incarcerated” instead of “felon” and “white” over “Caucasian,” and provides in-depth explanations for the change. It also provides definitions and historical context of words and phrases like “colorism,” “queer” and “critical race theory.” 

“The COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate impact of the virus on Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other historically marginalized groups have brought new urgency and focus to addressing long-standing inequities in health and health care,” said Gerald Harmon, MD, president of AMA. “In recognizing the power in our words, it is our hope that this guide will stimulate conversation and understanding about language, narrative, and concepts”

Test Your Visual Diagnostic Skills

Ready to test your medical diagnostic skills with visual clues (photos, radiographs, EKG, pathology slide, etc)? By using Harrison’s Visual Case Challenge via AccessMedicine, this just got easier!

Each challenge presents a case that includes two conditions for each patient. You can make a diagnosis based soley on the visual information provided or you can request more information on the patient before making your diagnosis. To ensure you understand the content, there are nearly 70 Clinical Pearls currently provided covering a variety of general internal medicine topics, with more coming!

Here’s how you can get started:

  • Go to AccessMedicine
  • Click on the Cases drop down menu at the top of the page
  • Click on the link for Harrison’s Visual Case Challenge
  • Pick a case and start diagnosing!

Updated Clinical Key

Have you noticed some of the new features of ClinicalKey?

In case you are unfamiliar, Elsevier’s ClinicalKey is a medical search engine that gives you access to:

  • Full-text reference books (over a 1000!) and journals including top titles such as Gray’s Anatomy, Goldman’s Cecil Medicine, Braunwald’s Heart Disease, The Lancet and Mayo Clinic Proceedings
  • Clinical Overviews that provide succinct, easy-to-navigate summaries for quick answers
  • Drug monographs
  • Clinical calculators
  • Practice guidelines
  • Customizable patient education handouts
  • Drug indications, do not crush list, identifier, and adverse reactions
  • Medical and procedure videos, images, and more

The redesigned homepages features a new search bar with improved auto-suggest delivering more relevant results.

The cards displayed below the search box help you to quickly see available resources. Now you can browse more quickly for specific clinical topics, drug information, tools, books, and journals.

The Clinical Overview provides a nice summary for PPPC presentations!

To take advantage of all the features of ClinicalKey, create an account by going to ClinicalKey and click Register in the top right corner. Be sure to use your SHU email address when registering.

Once you register for a personal account, you’ll have the ability to earn, track and claim CME credits, use the Presentation Maker tool, save content (like chapter PDFs), and more!

Take a deep dive into ClinicalKey and let us know if you have any questions!

Workshop Wednesday: So You Want to Submit an Article for Publication?

Want to know where you should be publishing? If you’re just starting out in your research career, one of the first challenges you might face is deciding which journal is right for your submission.

With so many prestigious journals out there, which one is going to give you the best chances of publishing successfully?

This workshop will provide an overview of the questions you need to ask and the points you need to consider in order to choose the RIGHT journal for your work.

We will look at things you can do before you begin writing, things to do when writing and tools to help locate journals that are the best fit for your work. Wed. Oct 20, 12-1pm. All classes are Free but registration is required.

In this Rare Book, the History of Medicine Inspires Literature

Blog post by Dr. Sarah Ponichtera, Assistant Dean of Special Collections & the Gallery. See original post at the Special Collections & the Gallery blog.

A beautifully bound medical text containing the research of the pioneering 19th century physicians Drs Corvisart and Auenbrűgger was recently donated to Special Collections at Walsh Library by Anthony Valerio, a writer who used it in the research for one of his novels. One of the authors, Dr. Corvisart, was Napoleon I’s private physician.  Instead of joining Napoleon I’s campaign to Italy, he stayed behind and translated his predecessor Auenbrűgger’s writings from Latin to French. Auenbrűgger developed the percussive technique of physical examination, which led to the invention of the stethoscope.  His father was a merchant, and young Auenbrűgger played with his father’s wine barrels as a boy, which made different sounds according to how he drummed them, inspiring his later discovery.  These works – and the stories behind them –  inspired Valerio to write a novel depicting a similar medical breakthrough.

A beautifully bound medical text containing the research of the pioneering 19th century physicians Drs Corvisart and Auenbrűgger.

Valerio’s novel tells the story of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmesweis, who did groundbreaking work in obstetrics.  In Valerio’s words, “The field of obstetrics, then, was relatively new. In Vienna’s medical school, which Semmelweis attended, it was an elective of a few months. Dr. Skoda, a famed diagnostician and internist, was Semmelweis’s mentor and teacher. Skoda taught Corvisart’s work on the heart. Upon obtaining his medical degree, Semmelweis sought a job with Skoda but one was not open. Semmelweis then trained with famed surgeon Dr. Karl von Rokitansky, who performed all autopsies in the hospital. Semmelweis obtained a degree in surgery and sought a job with Rokindansky. Again, one was not open. But an assistant’s job did open in a relatively new field,  obstetrics. Semmelweis took this job at a time when childbed fever was the scourge of Europe, the pandemic of his time, women dying of this terrible disease at alarming rates. Theories were advanced as to its cause and means of prevention. Semmelweis rejected them all. He was determined to find those causes and means of prevention—which journey I attempted to describe in detail in my book. Semmelweis did not know what he was looking for. His approach included his studies of Corvisart on the heart, Skoda’s work on palpitation,  Auenbrűgger’s work on the varied sounding of the human body with a stethoscope. Semmelweis read and researched after his daily tour of rounds, in his small room in the Vienna hospital.”

This medical text and the literary novel it inspired demonstrate that literature can evolve from science, just as scientific advances can be derived from childhood games.  Insight and inspiration know no disciplinary boundaries.

To see this book in person, or investigate other Special Collections materials, our Research Appointments page has details on how to proceed.

Weekend Hours Start April 24

Starting Saturday, April 24th the IHS Campus, including the IHS Library, will be open to students, faculty, and staff on weekends from 8:00am to 4:00pm.

Students are encouraged to utilize the library and student lounges only. No classroom doors will be opened for students unless authorized by a present faculty or staff member.

Please be advised, all parking procedures will be strictly enforced. Students must have a valid parking permit to be granted access into the South Lot.

All standard campus COVID-19 precautions will remain in place. Please continue to maintain proper social distancing and wear a mask.

Introducing Workshop Wednesdays

Online WorkshopThe IHS Library recently introduced “Workshop Wednesdays,” a weekly instructional session series that meets Wednesdays at 12pm over Zoom. Workshops range from an introduction to the IHS Library’s resources and services, to deeper dives into Point of Care tools and the citation management software, Zotero. The sessions are open to faculty, students and staff at Seton Hall University and Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Check out our April and May listings here.

“The goal of Workshop Wednesdays is to showcase the various tools and services we offer at the IHS Library to support our community of researchers. We are very excited for this initiative!” says Chris Duffy, IHS Library Director.

Zoom workshop

Workshop Wednesdays will also be the home to a 3-part series for those wishing to publish. Developed and led by Medical Librarian, Peggy Dreker, this series will introduce researchers to the major tools used to measure research impact, as well as enhance research impact through an author profile, networks, publication opportunities, and understanding journal rankings and organization.

We hope to see you soon at one of our workshops! Check back often for new session listings.