Chemical informatio​n and the Jan 2014 West Virginia Elk River chemical release

From TOXNET: You may be aware from multiple news sources that little information was available about 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol at the time of the spill in West Virginia's Elk River earlier this month. Since the spill, government and private sector scientists have contributed to collecting and verifying information about the chemical. As a result, there is now …

PubMed Commons: New comment forum on PubMed

From the PubMed Commons Blog: If you are one of the millions of people who visit PubMed today, be on the look-out for something different. On each abstract page, there’s now a section called PubMed Commons. It’s a forum for scientific discussion on publications open to any authors in the world’s largest biomedical literature database. Several …

PubMed’s end of year processing & your searches

The University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System has posted a good explanation of what "end-of-year processing" means for PubMed and for searching--& what you should do about it:  Why is Searching PubMed in Late Autumn Different than Any Other Time of the Year?

New publication model for PubMed citations

In mid-June 2013, a new publication model, Electronic-eCollection, was introduced for PubMed citations from electronic-only journals. "Electronic-eCollection" means that an article is published electronically on a specific date and is also associated with an electronic collection date (similar to an issue; this date can be a year or a year and month, but never a year, month, and …

Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda: Health-Related Information Resources

A new web page, “Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda: Health-Related Information Resources,” is now available from the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) Disaster Information Management Research Center. The resources on this page may be of value to international responders and response planners as well as to U.S. friends and family of people in the Philippines. http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/dimrc/typhoonHaiyan.html …

New public health MeSH terms for 2014

Each year, PubMed adds, changes, & deletes terms in the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) database, which contains all the terms used to index articles in Medline.  I'm always excited (yes, really!) to see what new terms are available for public health, since that makes searching so much easier & accurate.  I've gathered a list of the new terms …

PubMed “relevance sort”

On October 22, a new option was added to PubMed:  Relevance sort.   This option is available from the Display Settings menu under Sort by. The relevance sort is based on an algorithm that analyzes each PubMed citation that includes the search terms.  A "weight" is calculated for citations depending on how many search terms are …

New Resources from the NLM: Subject Guides

Have you ever REALLY wanted to know more about health statistics? What about library statistics? Conference Proceedings? Well, apparently a lot of people had questions on those topics and the ever vigilant librarians in the Public Services Division at the National Library of Medicine have responded! They have created a new set of subject guides …

Binding Wounds | Pushing Boundaries – New Exhibit @ THL

Starting today and on display through August 31, 2013, come see the Binding Wounds Pushing Boundaries exhibit at the Taubman Health Sciences Library.  Focusing on African Americans in Civil War medicine, the exhibit highlights the far too frequently overlooked contributions of African American nurses, surgeons, and hospital workers in one of America's greatest conflicts as …

New Blog from NLM’s History of Medicine Division

The absolutely phenomenal History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine has just launched a new blog, Circulating Now. Circulating Now is designed to bring this division's treasured (and truly priceless) collections to a wider audience than ever before. Read the introductory post from the division's Chief, Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, here. Circulating Now kicked …