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Sheldon Margen Public Health Library News 02/07/2007

For questions about any of the following, please call 642-2511 or email msholinb@library.berkeley.edu. Past issues of this newsletter are archived at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PUBL/PHLN.html.

SHELDON MARGEN PUBLIC HEALTH LIBRARY NEWS 02/07/2007

I. New Electronic Resources:

Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive
Natural Standard
OECD Health Data 2006
AIDS Posters

II. BIOSIS backfiles now available

III. Library Prize for Undergraduate Research

IV. PubMed updates:

Health Literacy Search Added to Special Queries
Changes to OLDMEDLINE (1950-1965 Citations)

I. New Electronic Resources:

Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive
Natural Standard
OECD Health Data 2006
AIDS Poster Collection

Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive, (COBRA), is a scholar-driven repository of biostatistics working papers. Major departments and institutions are contributing their prepublication materials to the collection. Browse by topic (Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistical Models, etc.); by institution, or by journal. The database is also searchable by title, author, keyword, and more. From the Berkeley Electronic Press.

Natural Standard (NOTE: Access limited to UCB faculty, staff and students) aims to provide high-quality, reliable information about complementary and alternative therapies to clinicians, patients, and healthcare institutions. Through systematic aggregation and analysis of scientific data, incorporation of historic and folkloric perspectives, consultation with multidisciplinary editorial experts, use of validated grading scales, and blinded peer-review processes, Natural Standard builds evidence-based and consensus-based content. This content is designed to support safer and more informed therapeutic decisions.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Health Data 2006 (NOTE: Access limited to UCB faculty, staff and students) is a interactive database covering over 1,200 indicators and offering sophisticated query modules. The most recent data are for 2003/2004, with some time series going back as far as 1960. Main fields covered include:
  • Health status
  • Health care utilisation
  • Health care resources
  • Expenditure on health
  • Health care financing
  • Social protection
  • Pharmaceutical market
  • Non-medical determinants of health
  • Demographic references
  • Economic references
OECD Health Data is available both as an online interactive database and as a downloadable executable, suitable for offline use.

AIDS Poster Collection consists of 625 posters from 44 countries. The posters were issued by a variety of institutions and organizations to educate and warn people about AIDS and to offer advice and information in visual form. The database is searchable and browsable by title, country, subject, and creator. From the UCLA Digital Library Collection.

More new resources are available on our What's New web page.

II. BIOSIS backfiles now available

The Biosis data is indexed by
  • Broad subject heading (i.e. Genetics, Ecology, Cell Biology)
  • Genus/species (if present)
  • Organism classifier (usually at the Family or Order level)
  • Broad taxonomic groups (birds, mammals, plants, bacteria)
for all articles back to 1926. The majority of the records also have abstracts. (Review articles, short papers and conference proceedings generally do not have abstracts.) This makes it very a very rich resource for searching the literature of the biological sciences.
Because the abbreviations used for a journal title varied quite a bit during the early years, links provided by UC-eLinks are particularly unreliable. Please ask reference desk at the Public Health Library for help in locating early works. We are fortunate to have strong historical collections at Berkeley, but UC-eLinks frequently can not find them.

III. Library Prize for Undergraduate Research: call for submissions

The Library Prize attracts the very best undergraduate papers from courses taught in departments across the campus. It recognizes excellence in undergraduate research projects that show evidence of:
  • significant inquiry using the library, its resources, and collections
  • learning about the research and information-gathering process itself.
A panel composed of UC Berkeley faculty, librarians and other educators will judge entries on the evidence of the applicant's research strategy, process, and personal learning. Submissions are due April 16, 2007, and research projects completed during either the Summer 2006, Fall 2006, or Spring 2007 semester at UCB are eligible. Details and previous winners' project descriptions are available on the Library Web.

IV. PubMed updates:

Health Literacy Search Added to Special Queries
A subject page for health literacy is now available from the National Library of Medicine's Special Queries resource page (link from PubMed's blue sidebar). This page provides a PubMed search strategy and selected links to other sources of health literacy information. The health literacy search, activated by clicking on the "MEDLINE/PubMed health literacy search" link, retrieves citations to English language journal literature. Users are encouraged to use features of PubMed to focus the search or expand it. For example, to focus the search, consider using the PubMed Limits tab. To expand the search, use the Related Articles link found to the right of each PubMed citation.
Changes to OLDMEDLINE (1950-1965 Citations)
The option for OLDMEDLINE has been removed from the Limits "Subsets" menu. The reduced number of citations in this subset and the growing number of older citations being added to PubMed that are not part of the OLDMEDLINE project, have lessened the value of this subset as a limit for searching. With the progress of mapping the OLDMEDLINE keywords to current Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, approximately 72% of the OLDMEDLINE citations have had all of their keywords mapped to current MeSH. These records will therefore be retrieved when limiting to the MEDLINE subset, or when searching with MeSH terms.

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