Getting to Full Text from Hospitals and Clinics

Are you having trouble finding free full-text articles from a computer in hospitals or clinics?

Be sure you authenticate at the Rudolph Matas Library web page before starting your search to access full-text journal articles, online books, and databases. All of the Tulane Hospitals and Clinics are on a different computer network than the University, making it necessary for you to sign in. You must follow the same procedure as if you are off-campus. Sometimes hospitals may have additional security and firewalls that may interfere with this process. Please contact the Library Reference Desk if you have problems, medref@tulane.edu or 988-5155.

If you need something that is not available, you can request it through ILLiad, the library’s free and speedy interlibrary loan service.

Matas Library web page: http://medlib.tulane.edu

Bill Postell Retires as Director of the Rudolph Matas Library

Ben Sachs and Bill Postell announce Bill’s retirement from Tulane as Director of the Rudolph Matas Library, effective 12/31/07.

Bill has been with Tulane for 33 years. He has served Tulane Health Sciences Center under four senior vice presidents, five deans of medicine, and four deans of public health and tropical medicine. Before coming to Tulane, he served as Assistant Director of the Rowland Medical Library of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Bill is a native New Orleanian.

During his tenure, the education and training levels required of the staff were raised in step with AAMC institutions nationwide. He led the effort to replace the card catalog system with a fully automated and integrated library system. In addition to the traditional library services in support medical education, research, and patient care here at Tulane, Bill and his staff assisted authors of numerous historical publications in their research and manuscript preparation.

During his career in academic medical library administration, Bill has frequently served as an officer in the Southern and South Central Chapters of the Medical Library Association. Twice he has been elected Chairman of the Board of the South Central Academic Medical Libraries Consortium, a non-profit corporation of which he was a founding member.

Bill and his wife, Nancy, look forward to spending more time with their children and grandchildren in Houston. Please join us in thanking Bill for his dedication to our University for his numerous contributions during his long and illustrious career at Tulane.

HSCADM-L@tulane.edu (message from Fri 1/4/2008 8:43 AM)

Hot Topics, Guidelines & Standards: December 2007

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has released the following policy statements:

• “Late-preterm” infants: A population at risk
• Patient safety in the pediatric emergency care setting
• Recognizing and responding to medical neglect
• Recommendations for preventive pediatric health care
• Role of schools in combating illicit substance abuse
• Technical report: Diagnosis of HIV-1 infection in children younger than 18 months in the United States

The American College of Physicians (ACP) has released a position paper in Annals of Internal Medicine, (4 Dec 2007), 147(11):792-794 on pay-for-performance principles that promote patient-centered care.

The American Heart Association (AHA) has published a new statement in Circulation, 116(24):2878, on the safety of magnetic resonance imaging in patients with cardiovascular devices.

The American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) has updated their guidelines on the role of endoscopy in dyspepsia.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has recently published the following:

• Update of recommendations for the use of tumor markers in breast cancer
• Clinical practice guideline on the use of epoetin and darbepoetin
• Recommendations for venous thromboembolism prophylaxis and treatment of patients with cancer
• Cancer Care Ontario and American Society of Clinical Oncology adjuvant chemotherapy and adjuvant radiation therapy for stages I-IIIA resectable non-small-cell lung cancer guideline

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated the following:

• Guidelines for the use of antiretroviral agents in HIV-1-infected adults and adolescents
• Recommendations for use of quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine (MCV4) in children 2-10 years
• Updated information regarding antiretroviral agents used as HIV postexposure prophylaxis for occupational HIV exposures

United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has updated the following recommendations:

• Screening for carotid artery stenosis
• Screening for high blood pressure

Excerpted and edited, from ECRI Institute, HCS Update. http://hcs.ecri.org/news/

ECRI Institute's Healthcare Standards Directory is available at the Rudolph Matas Medical Library, Ready Reference , W 22 AA1 H42 2007.

World AIDS Day - December 1, 2007

December 1, 2007 marked the 20th observance of World AIDS Day. The World Health Organization established World AIDS Day in 1988. World AIDS Day provides governments, national AIDS programs, faith organizations, community organizations, and individuals with an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic. In 2007, the estimated number of persons living with HIV worldwide was 33.2 million and there were 2.1 million AIDS deaths.


Additional information regarding World AIDS Day and HIV prevention is available:

• www.who.int/hiv : World Health Organization (WHO) and HIV AIDS
• www.cdc.gov/hiv: Centers for Disease Control (CDC) HIV site
• http://www.aids.gov/: a gateway to all Federal domestic information on HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, treatment, research, policies and resources.
• http://www.pepfar.gov/: President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
• http://www.hivtest.org/: HIV testing resources. Enter your zip code to find an HIV testing site near you!

http://www.worldaidsday.org/: brochures and information about international events.

Pandemic Influenza, John Barry's comments on recent research

John M. Barry's 2004 book on the 1918 pandemic, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, is regarded as a definitive historical review of that event (available in the Rudolph Matas Library, WC 515 B279 2004). A recent exchange between John Barry, Tulane's Center for Bioenvironmental Research, and Howard Markel, et. al. was published in JAMA's November 21st issue concerning the August 8th publication (JAMA 2007;298:644-654) titled: Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.

The Center for Infectious Disease and Policy has posted on its website an additional commentary by John Barry. Here's the link (and also links to the letter exchange and the original article) which includes introductory comments by Mike Osterholm:
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panflu/news/nov2707barry.html

Selected readings on pandemic influenza are available on the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy website, http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panflu/readings/index.html

Rising Journal Costs Limit Scholarly Access

A annual subscription to the journal, Brain was $17,444 in 2001, and now the same subscription costs $21,269. According to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) scholarly journal prices jumped 215 per cent during the 15-year period between 1986 and 2001. Electronic journals have only increased this trend of escalating subscription costs by forcing libraries to subscribe to groups of titles. In addition there is a concentration of a few companies that publish around 4,000 scholarly journals. There is also a trend of publishers charging for electronic copies of journals that used to be free with print subscriptions. The result of these ever increasing prices are cancellations of titles, cancellation of print in favor of electronic versions and the cutting other library budgets, such as the funding for books.

Just as some of the libraries in the article, the Rudolph Matas Library has converted journal subscriptions to electronic formats only (after Katina), in 2006.

The article by Emory suggests a few possible solutions to this crisis. Open access, with costs are paid by universities, foundations, federal agencies or others. Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an organization dedicated to the promotion of scholarship through competitive alternatives to commercial publishing. Emory also holds institutional memberships with several other the open access publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PloS).

Scholarly societies are investigating changing current publishing models. The articles also suggests that the academic community has the influence to change the current situation.

1) Carefully examine the pricing, copyright, and subscription licensing agreements of any journal you contribute to as an author, reviewer or editor.

2) Examine copyright agreements before publishing and modify them if possible to ensure your right to use your work or post it on a public archive. ...

3) Where possible, publish in open access journals which employ funding models that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. Serve on editorial boards or review manuscripts for open access journals. (For a list of open access journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals.

4) Encourage your society to explore alternatives to contacting or selling its publications to a commercial publisher.

5) Start your own open access journal!

Special Report: Rising Journal Costs Limit Scholarly Access INFOcus September 2007 > Courtesy of Emory University

RefWorks

RefWorks functions with Microsoft Word and other word processors to create footnotes, citations and a bibliography for your papers, formatted into the correct style (APA, Chicago Style, etc.). Come for a demonstration to see how RefWorks works with library databases. RefWorks helps organize and manage your research: import references from many databases, quickly add citations to your papers, and easily create reference lists in many formats (eg. APA, Chicago). RefWorks is online, so you can access your account from any web-enabled computer.

Class and group instruction is also available.

To learn more contact the Matas Reference Desk or try the RefWorks tutorial.

About RefWorks