bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2020‒05‒10
ten papers selected by
Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society


  1. JMIR Med Inform. 2020 May 06. 8(5): e16793
      BACKGROUND: There are approximately 1,000,000 pregnant women at high risk for obstetric complications per year, more than half of whom require hospitalization.OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to determine the relation between online health information seeking and anxiety levels in a sample of hospitalized woman with pregnancy-related complications.
    METHODS: A sample of 105 pregnant women hospitalized in northern Italy, all with an obstetric complication diagnosis, completed different questionnaires: Use of Internet Health-information (UIH) questionnaire about use of the internet, EuroQOL 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) questionnaire on quality of life, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) questionnaire measuring general anxiety levels, and a questionnaire about critical events occurring during hospitalization.
    RESULTS: Overall, 98/105 (93.3%) of the women used the internet at home to obtain nonspecific information about health in general and 95/105 (90.5%) of the women used the internet to specifically search for information related to their obstetric disease. Online health information-seeking behavior substantially decreased the self-reported anxiety levels (P=.008).
    CONCLUSIONS: Web browsing for health information was associated with anxiety reduction, suggesting that the internet can be a useful instrument in supporting professional intervention to control and possibly reduce discomfort and anxiety for women during complicated pregnancies.
    Keywords:  anxiety; internet use; pregnant women; web health information
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2196/16793
  2. Nucleic Acids Res. 2020 May 08. pii: gkaa333. [Epub ahead of print]
      Manually annotated data is key to developing text-mining and information-extraction algorithms. However, human annotation requires considerable time, effort and expertise. Given the rapid growth of biomedical literature, it is paramount to build tools that facilitate speed and maintain expert quality. While existing text annotation tools may provide user-friendly interfaces to domain experts, limited support is available for figure display, project management, and multi-user team annotation. In response, we developed TeamTat (https://www.teamtat.org), a web-based annotation tool (local setup available), equipped to manage team annotation projects engagingly and efficiently. TeamTat is a novel tool for managing multi-user, multi-label document annotation, reflecting the entire production life cycle. Project managers can specify annotation schema for entities and relations and select annotator(s) and distribute documents anonymously to prevent bias. Document input format can be plain text, PDF or BioC (uploaded locally or automatically retrieved from PubMed/PMC), and output format is BioC with inline annotations. TeamTat displays figures from the full text for the annotator's convenience. Multiple users can work on the same document independently in their workspaces, and the team manager can track task completion. TeamTat provides corpus quality assessment via inter-annotator agreement statistics, and a user-friendly interface convenient for annotation review and inter-annotator disagreement resolution to improve corpus quality.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa333
  3. J Glob Health. 2020 Jun;10(1): 010403
      Background: Public health awareness can help prevent illness and result in earlier intervention when it does occur. For this reason, health promotion and disease awareness campaigns have great potential to alleviate the global burden of disease. Global Public Health Days (GPHD) are frequently implemented with this intent, but research evaluating their effectiveness, especially in the developing world setting, is scant.Objectives: We aimed to evaluate the impact of four GPHDs (World Cancer Day, World Diabetes Day, World Mental Health Day, World AIDS Day) on online health information seeking behaviour (OHISB) in five Central and South American (CSA) countries which differ in their stage of economic development and epidemiological transition (Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua).
    Methods: Google Trends data was used as a 'surrogate' of OHISB. This was measured on the 28 days leading up to the GPHD, on the date of the GPHD, and on the seven days following it. The Joinpoint regression programme was used to perform a time trend analysis on the Google Trends data. This allowed us to identify statistically significant time points of a change in trend, which reflect significant 'changes' to OHISB.
    Results: GPHDs were inconsistently effective at influencing internet search query activity in the studied countries. In situations where an effect was significant, this impact was consistently short-term, with Relative Search Volume level returning to precampaign levels within 7 days of the GPHD.
    Conclusions: Our findings imply the need to revise GPHDs or create alternative health awareness campaigns, perhaps with a more long-term approach and tailored to the specific health needs of the CSA population. Developing effective preventive strategies is vital in helping combat the rising threat of NCDs in this region.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.10.010403
  4. Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz. 2020 May 04.
      BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Taking an active role in healthcare requires comprehensive health knowledge. One's own online search for health information can contribute to an appropriate information base. Therefore, it seems essential to determine the extent to which online services and health apps are currently used in Germany as well as to analyze which personal and motivational factors influence whether and how often the German public search for health information online or use health apps.METHODS: We conducted an online survey among the German public in a sample stratified by demographic characteristics (N = 3000). The questionnaire measured the health-related use of the Internet and health apps as well as possible personal and motivational factors. The relevance of these factors for explaining the Internet use for health-related purposes was determined by regression analyses.
    RESULTS: While health-related information searches using the Internet are widespread in Germany, health apps are used less frequently. In particular health information platforms are most frequently used to search for information on disease symptoms. Turning to the Internet for health-related purposes is mainly influenced by motivational factors. Having current health problems and possessing information-seeking skills are particularly influential factors for an individual's Internet use.
    CONCLUSIONS: In order to unfold the potential associated with health-related online information-seeking behaviors, it is necessary that people are motivated and feel competent to gather online information themselves. In particular, the corresponding skills need to be promoted in order to reduce the risk of increasing informational, health, and social disparities.
    Keywords:  Empowered patients; Health promotion; Health-realted online search; Uncertainty management
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00103-020-03144-5
  5. Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz. 2020 May 04.
      The Internet is now a central source of health information. An ideal design of web services and e‑health programs requires valid evaluations of users' perceptions, the so-called user experience. As part of a research project with the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA), a toolbox for website evaluation (for screening and monitoring) was compiled for this purpose from freely available quantitative empirical questionnaires. With this toolbox, key aspects of the web user experience can be reliably and validly assessed. In this article, we describe the toolbox's components, underlying quality criteria, and practical experiences.The aim of the toolbox is to facilitate methodically high-quality, comprehensive, and time-efficient analyses. A total of nine standardized instruments and supplementary single items from three areas are documented. In the standard version of the toolbox, 35 items are used that can be answered in less than 10 min. For an extended examination of a website, the toolbox documents additional measures on website content, usability, and aesthetics. We discuss both the advantages and limitations of the toolbox and give an outlook on possible future developments.
    Keywords:  Digital health communication; Evaluation methods; E‑health; Quality assurance; Usability
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00103-020-03142-7
  6. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2020 May 01. 27(5): 738-746
      OBJECTIVE: To study the newly adopted International Classification of Diseases 11th revision (ICD-11) and compare it to the International Classification of Diseases 10th revision (ICD-10) and International Classification of Diseases 10th revision-Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM).MATERIALS AND METHODS: : Data files and maps were downloaded from the World Health Organization (WHO) website and through the application programming interfaces. A round trip method based on the WHO maps was used to identify equivalent codes between ICD-10 and ICD-11, which were validated by limited manual review. ICD-11 terms were mapped to ICD-10-CM through normalized lexical mapping. ICD-10-CM codes in 6 disease areas were also manually recoded in ICD-11.
    RESULTS: Excluding the chapters for traditional medicine, functioning assessment, and extension codes for postcoordination, ICD-11 has 14 622 leaf codes (codes that can be used in coding) compared to ICD-10 and ICD-10-CM, which has 10 607 and 71 932 leaf codes, respectively. We identified 4037 pairs of ICD-10 and ICD-11 codes that were equivalent (estimated accuracy of 96%) by our round trip method. Lexical matching between ICD-11 and ICD-10-CM identified 4059 pairs of possibly equivalent codes. Manual recoding showed that 60% of a sample of 388 ICD-10-CM codes could be fully represented in ICD-11 by precoordinated codes or postcoordination.
    CONCLUSION: In ICD-11, there is a moderate increase in the number of codes over ICD-10. With postcoordination, it is possible to fully represent the meaning of a high proportion of ICD-10-CM codes, especially with the addition of a limited number of extension codes.
    Keywords:  ICD-10; ICD-10-CM; ICD-11; controlled medical vocabularies; medical terminologies
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocaa030
  7. Nucleic Acids Res. 2020 May 07. pii: gkaa328. [Epub ahead of print]
      Thanks to recent efforts by the text mining community, biocurators have now access to plenty of good tools and Web interfaces for identifying and visualizing biomedical entities in literature. Yet, many of these systems start with a PubMed query, which is limited by strong Boolean constraints. Some semantic search engines exploit entities for Information Retrieval, and/or deliver relevance-based ranked results. Yet, they are not designed for supporting a specific curation workflow, and allow very limited control on the search process. The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Literature Services (SIBiLS) provide personalized Information Retrieval in the biological literature. Indeed, SIBiLS allow fully customizable search in semantically enriched contents, based on keywords and/or mapped biomedical entities from a growing set of standardized and legacy vocabularies. The services have been used and favourably evaluated to assist the curation of genes and gene products, by delivering customized literature triage engines to different curation teams. SIBiLS (https://candy.hesge.ch/SIBiLS) are freely accessible via REST APIs and are ready to empower any curation workflow, built on modern technologies scalable with big data: MongoDB and Elasticsearch. They cover MEDLINE and PubMed Central Open Access enriched by nearly 2 billion of mapped biomedical entities, and are daily updated.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa328
  8. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2020 May 07. 20(1): 105
      BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to assess the overall quality of study-level meta-analyses in high-ranking journals using commonly employed guidelines and standards for systematic reviews and meta-analyses.METHODS: 100 randomly selected study-level meta-analyses published in ten highest-ranking clinical journals in 2016-2017 were evaluated by medical librarians against 4 assessments using a scale of 0-100: the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS), Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), Institute of Medicine's (IOM) Standards for Systematic Reviews, and quality items from the Cochrane Handbook. Multiple regression was performed to assess meta-analyses characteristics' associated with quality scores.
    RESULTS: The overall median (interquartile range) scores were: PRESS 62.5(45.8-75.0), PRISMA 92.6(88.9-96.3), IOM 81.3(76.6-85.9), and Cochrane 66.7(50.0-83.3). Involvement of librarians was associated with higher PRESS and IOM scores on multiple regression. Compliance with journal guidelines was associated with higher PRISMA and IOM scores.
    CONCLUSION: This study raises concerns regarding the reporting and methodological quality of published MAs in high impact journals Early involvement of information specialists, stipulation of detailed author guidelines, and strict adherence to them may improve quality of published meta-analyses.
    Keywords:  Clinical; Cochrane; Epidemiology; IOM; Meta-analysis; Methodology; PRESS; PRISMA; Quality
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-00999-9
  9. Health Inf Manag. 2020 May 05. 1833358320917207
      BACKGROUND: Data sharing presents new opportunities across the spectrum of research and is vital for science that is open, where data are easily discoverable, accessible, intelligible, reproducible, replicable and verifiable. Despite this, it is yet to become common practice. Global efforts to develop practical guidance for data sharing and open access initiatives are underway, however evidence-based studies to inform the development and implementation of effective strategies are lacking.OBJECTIVE: This study sought to determine the barriers and facilitators to data sharing among health researchers and to identify the target behaviours for designing a behaviour change intervention strategy.
    METHOD: Data were drawn from a cross-sectional survey of data management practices among health researchers from one Australian research institute. Determinants of behaviour were theoretically derived using well-established behavioural models.
    RESULTS: Data sharing practices have been described for 77 researchers, and 6 barriers and 4 facilitators identified. The primary barriers to data sharing included perceived negative consequences and lack of competency to share data. The primary facilitators to data sharing included trust in others using the data and social influence related to public benefit. Intervention functions likely to be most effective at changing target behaviours were also identified.
    CONCLUSION: Results of this study provide a theoretical and evidence-based process to understand the behavioural barriers and facilitators of data sharing among health researchers.
    IMPLICATIONS: Designing interventions that specifically address target behaviours to promote data sharing are important for open researcher practices.
    Keywords:  data sharing; health information management; research
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/1833358320917207