bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2019–02–17
twelve papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society
  1. Medical Librarians Can Help Providers Improve Clinical Decision-Making and Education.
  2. [Systematic literature search in PubMed : A short introduction].
  3. Modeling Keyword Search Strategy: Analysis of Pharmacovigilance Specialists' Search of MedDRA Terms.
  4. Scientific fraud in anaesthesiology publications.
  5. The Right to Write: Who 'Owns' the Case Report?
  6. A preliminary biopsychosocial analysis of online information on causes of neck pain.
  7. Seeking Formula for Misinformation Treatment in Public Health Crises: The Effects of Corrective Information Type and Source.
  8. Men's health on the web: an analysis of current resources.
  9. Design of a generic, open platform for machine learning-assisted indexing and clustering of articles in PubMed, a biomedical bibliographic database.
  10. Health Topics on Facebook Groups: Content Analysis of Posts in Multiple Sclerosis Communities.
  11. Disparity in online health information in pediatric vs. adult surgical conditions.
  12. A Comparative Multimetric Assessment of English and Spanish Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Materials.
  1. Pediatr Ann. 2019 Feb 01. 48(2): e49-e50
    Medical Librarians Can Help Providers Improve Clinical Decision-Making and Education.
    Joseph R Hageman.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3928/19382359-20190116-01
  2. Z Rheumatol. 2019 Feb 12.
    [Systematic literature search in PubMed : A short introduction].
    A Blümle, W A Lagrèze, E Motschall.
      In order to identify current (and relevant) evidence for a specific clinical question within the unmanageable amount of information available, solid skills in performing a systematic literature search are essential. An efficient approach is to search a biomedical database containing relevant literature citations of study reports. The best known database is MEDLINE, which is searchable for free via the PubMed interface. In this article, we explain step by step how to perform a systematic literature search via PubMed by means of an example research question in the field of ophthalmology. First, we demonstrate how to translate the clinical problem into a well-framed and searchable research question, how to identify relevant search terms and how to conduct a text word search and a search with keywords in medical subject headings (MeSH) terms. We then show how to limit the number of search results if the search yields too many irrelevant hits and how to increase the number in the case of too few citations. Finally, we summarize all essential principles that guide a literature search via PubMed.
    Keywords:  Bibliographic databases; MEDLINE; Medical subject headings; PubMed; Systematic literature search
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00393-019-0603-1
  3. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 ;257 298-302
    Modeling Keyword Search Strategy: Analysis of Pharmacovigilance Specialists' Search of MedDRA Terms.
    Romaric Marcilly, Laura Douze, Cedric Bousquet, Sylvia Pelayo.
      In the information retrieval task, searching and choosing keywords to form the query is crucial. The present study analyzes and describes the keywords' search strategy into a thesaurus in the field of pharmacovigilance. Two ergonomics experts shadowed 22 pharmacovigilance specialists during their daily work. They focus on the strategies for searching and choosing MedDRA terms to build pharmacovigilance queries. Interviews of four pharmacovigilance specialists completed the observations. Results highlight that, for unusual or complex searches, pharmacovigilance specialists proceed iteratively in three main phases: (i) preparation of a list of terms and of evaluation criteria, (ii) exploration of the MedDRA hierarchy and choice of a term, and (iii) evaluation of the results against the criteria. Overall, the search and the choice of keywords within a thesaurus shares similarity with the information retrieval task and is closely interwoven with the query building process. Based on the results, the paper proposes design specifications for new interfaces supporting the identification of MedDRA terms so that pharmacovigilance reports searches achieve a good level of expressiveness.
    Keywords:  Cognitive work analysis; Information retrieval; MedDRA; Modelling; pharmacovigilance
  4. Vet Anaesth Analg. 2018 Nov 28. pii: S1467-2987(18)30295-2. [Epub ahead of print]
    Scientific fraud in anaesthesiology publications.
    Ioannis Savvas, Kiriaki Pavlidou.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaa.2018.11.002
  5. Eur J Case Rep Intern Med. 2019 ;6(1): 001005
    The Right to Write: Who 'Owns' the Case Report?
    Akanksha Agrawal, Dylan Eiger, Deepanshu Jain, Richard Allman, Glenn Eiger.
      In this Letter to the Editor, Agrawal et al. debate the conflicts that can arise regarding the authorship of case reports. Like all other medical journals, EJCRIM has zero tolerance for the willful undisclosed re-submission of papers that have already been published elsewhere. However, this may occasionally happen by accident, especially in large healthcare institutions in which multiple teams of physicians may care for a patient throughout their illness. EJCRIM endorses and recommends to all potential authors the very sensible suggestions made by Agrawal et al. to avoid such an error occurring. EJCRIM would also encourage authors to consider the following: The first author should ensure that no one else involved in the case has reported it or plans to report it. This is especially important for physicians working in large healthcare centres, and/or for case reports of patients who have been under investigation or treatment for prolonged periods.On rare occasions EJCRIM will consider a case that has already been published, provided that this is fully and explicitly disclosed, and there is a clear reason why re-publication is justified. An example might be where new information has come to light that significantly changes the conclusions of the original report. As in all reports published by EJCRIM the decision to publish will depend on the educational value, or learning points, of the case.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.12890/2019_001005
  6. Musculoskeletal Care. 2019 Feb 14.
    A preliminary biopsychosocial analysis of online information on causes of neck pain.
    Y V Raghava Neelapala, Riya Raja, Aishwarya Bhandary.
       OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to analyse the freely available online information on the causes of neck pain based on the biopsychosocial model of pain.
    METHODS: A preliminary biopsychosocial analysis tool was developed, after an extensive literature review of the pathoanatomical and psychosocial contributors for neck pain. The websites that commonly appeared after the search term "causes of neck pain" in the first two pages of the search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) were selected for the biopsychosocial analysis. In addition, the websites were reviewed for Health on Net (HON) certification.
    RESULTS: Ten websites were analysed, of which eight were identified to contain a predominant biomedical orientation, as they reported only the pathoanatomical causes of neck pain. The remaining two websites were determined to represent limited psychosocial information and described only two psychological contributors to the neck pain.
    CONCLUSIONS: The online information on the causes of neck pain appears to contain limited biopsychosocial orientation. Further detailed analysis is essential to obtain firm conclusions on the content validity of online information on neck pain.
    Keywords:  cervical pain; health information; web-based information
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/msc.1388
  7. Health Commun. 2019 Feb 14. 1-16
    Seeking Formula for Misinformation Treatment in Public Health Crises: The Effects of Corrective Information Type and Source.
    Toni G L A van der Meer, Yan Jin.
      An increasing lack of information truthfulness has become a fundamental challenge to communications. Insights into how to debunk this type of misinformation can especially be crucial for public health crises. To identify corrective information strategies that increase awareness and trigger actions during infectious disease outbreaks, an online experiment (N = 700) was conducted, using a U.S. sample. After initial misinformation exposure, participants' exposure to corrective information type (simple rebuttal vs. factual elaboration) and source (government health agency vs. news media vs. social peer) was varied, including a control group without corrective information. Results show that, if corrective information is present rather than absent, incorrect beliefs based on misinformation are debunked and the exposure to factual elaboration, compared to simple rebuttal, stimulates intentions to take protective actions. Moreover, government agency and news media sources are found to be more successful in improving belief accuracy compared to social peers. The observed mediating role of crisis emotions reveals the mechanism underlying the effects of corrective information. The findings contribute to misinformation research by providing a formula for correcting the increasing spread of misinformation in times of crisis.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2019.1573295
  8. World J Urol. 2019 Feb 12.
    Men's health on the web: an analysis of current resources.
    Jiasian Teh, Joe Wei, Glen Chiang, Tatenda C Nzenza, Damien Bolton, Nathan Lawrentschuk.
       INTRODUCTION: Men's health research covers a broad range of topics. Men and women face different barriers to health, with men almost universally having a lower life expectancy than women. Access to high-quality information on men's health topics is potentially an important part of engaging men with medical services. We aim to assess the quality of men's health resources available on the internet across 4 developed countries using a tier-based rating system as well as the World Health Organisation Health on the Net (HON) standards.
    METHODS: The Google search engine imbedded with the Health on the Net toolbar was used to assess 357 websites across Australia, Canada, America and United Kingdom using the search term 'men's health'. The websites were further subdivided into 3 tiers by 2 independent investigators, with tier 1 websites defined as government or health organisation sponsored, tier 2 websites defined as being sponsored by health services such as private clinics and insurance providers, and tier 3 websites being websites that did not meet criteria for the first 2 tiers.
    RESULTS: Overall, 28% of websites were rated as tier 1, 26% as tier 2 and 46% as tier 3. The HONcode accreditation was overall 39% of tier 1 websites. The majority of websites reviewed were in the tier 3 category, and 35% of overall websites being non-health or non-medically related.
    DISCUSSION: The lack of 'relevant' and HONcode-accredited websites relating to men's health should be appreciated by health care professionals.
    Keywords:  Adult; Health information seeking; Internet; Men; Men’s health
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00345-019-02670-5
  9. Data Inf Manag. 2018 Jun;2(1): 27-36
    Design of a generic, open platform for machine learning-assisted indexing and clustering of articles in PubMed, a biomedical bibliographic database.
    Neil R Smalheiser, Aaron M Cohen.
      Many investigators have carried out text mining of the biomedical literature for a variety of purposes, ranging from the assignment of indexing terms to the disambiguation of author names. A common approach is to define positive and negative training examples, extract features from article metadata, and employ machine learning algorithms. At present, each research group tackles each problem from scratch, and in isolation of other projects, which causes redundancy and great waste of effort. Here, we propose and describe the design of a generic platform for biomedical text mining, which can serve as a shared resource for machine learning projects, and can serve as a public repository for their outputs. We will initially focus on a specific goal, namely, classifying articles according to Publication Type, and emphasize how feature sets can be made more powerful and robust through the use of multiple, heterogeneous similarity measures as input to machine learning models. We then discuss how the generic platform can be extended to include a wide variety of other machine learning based goals and projects, and can be used as a public platform for disseminating the results of NLP tools to end-users as well.
    Keywords:  Text mining; community platforms; data sharing; machine learning; open science; semantic similarity; vector representation
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2478/dim-2018-0004
  10. Interact J Med Res. 2019 Feb 11. 8(1): e10146
    Health Topics on Facebook Groups: Content Analysis of Posts in Multiple Sclerosis Communities.
    Sara Della Rosa, Falguni Sen.
       BACKGROUND: Social network sites (SNSs) are being increasingly used to exchange health information between patients and practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, and research centers. Research contributions have explored the contents of such exchanges discussed online. They have categorized the topics discussed and explored the engagement levels of these discussions.
    OBJECTIVE: This research aimed at investigating the potential role of SNSs in health care. Specifically it provides an information-clustering analysis of the health information available on SNSs and develops a research design that allows an investigation of this information in enhancing health care research and delivery. In addition, this research aims at testing whether SNSs are valid tools for sharing drug-related information by patients.
    METHODS: This research is based on a specific chronic disease: multiple sclerosis. We searched Facebook to identify and research the social media groups related to this condition. The analysis was restricted to public groups for privacy concerns. We created a database by downloading posts from two main groups (in the English language). Subsequently, we performed a content analysis and statistical analysis; this allowed us to explore the differences between categories, their engagement levels, and the types of posts shared. The mean level of engagement for each topic was analyzed using a 1-way analysis of variance.
    RESULTS: From a sample of 7029 posts, initial results showed that there were 8 information categories that resonated (percentage of times the topic appears in our sample) with those who post on Facebook: information and awareness (4923/7029, 70.04%), event advertising and petitions (365/7029, 5.19%), fundraising (354/7029, 5.04%), patient support (217/7029, 3.09%), drug discussion (144/7029, 2.05%), clinical trials and research studies (59/7029, 0.84%), product and drug advertising (48/7029, 0.68%), and other (919/7029, 13.07%). Initial analysis showed that comments and likes (as measures of engagement level) are the most frequent indicators and measures of level of engagement. Our results show a high engagement level (in terms of views, likes, comments, etc) for patient support and information and awareness. In addition, although drug discussion had a low resonance, it had an unexpected highly engagement level which we found worthy of further exploration.
    CONCLUSIONS: SNSs have become important tools for patients and health care practitioners to share or seek information. We identified the type of information shared and how the public reacted to it. Our research confirmed that the topics discussed in social media related to specific diseases such as multiple sclerosis are similar to the information categories observed by other researchers. We unexpectedly found other categories such as drug discussion. These and other results of our study enhance our understanding of how content is disseminated and perceived within a specific disease-based community. We concluded that this information has useful implications in the design of prevention campaigns, educational programs, and chronic disease management.
    Keywords:  Facebook; content analysis; health care internet; health information; social network
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2196/10146
  11. Pediatr Surg Int. 2019 Feb 15.
    Disparity in online health information in pediatric vs. adult surgical conditions.
    Edward C Dee, Nathan H Varady, Jeffrey N Katz, Terry L Buchmiller.
       BACKGROUND: Although the quality of online health information (OHI) for adult surgical conditions is well described, the availability of quality OHI for pediatric surgical conditions, and the comparison to that of adult surgical OHI, remains undefined.
    METHODS: Medical and lay terms for 15 pediatric and 15 adult surgical conditions were searched using Google in English. The Health on the Net Foundation, a non-governmental OHI accreditation body, designates approval for quality websites. We compared the role of patient population while controlling for disease incidence (pediatric vs. adult), term complexity (medical vs. lay), and order (earlier vs. later listing of websites) on availability of quality OHI among the first 100 websites for each term.
    RESULTS: Among the first 100 websites, the adjusted mean number of quality websites was 11.80 for pediatric vs. 17.92 for adult medical search terms, and 13.27 for pediatric vs. 18.20 for adult lay search terms (P < 0.05 for all). Term complexity did not affect quality, and earlier appearing results were more likely to be of high quality.
    CONCLUSION: Availability of quality pediatric surgical OHI lags behind that of adult surgical OHI, even when controlling for disease incidence. These findings highlight the potential need for increased quality OHI in pediatric surgery.
    Keywords:  General surgery; Internet; Pediatric surgery; eHealth
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00383-019-04451-y
  12. J Surg Res. 2019 Feb 07. pii: S0022-4804(19)30039-3. [Epub ahead of print]238 64-71
    A Comparative Multimetric Assessment of English and Spanish Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Materials.
    Anna Rose Johnson, Andres F Doval, Melisa D Granoff, Sabine A Egeler, Miguel G Bravo, A Samandar Dowlatshahi, Samuel J Lin, Bernard T Lee.
       BACKGROUND: Spanish-speaking Hispanics living in the United States utilize the internet as a primary means to obtain health information. Accurate, accessible information is important for English speakers; however, it could have even greater utility for Spanish speakers who have lower health literacy levels. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare online English and Spanish carpal tunnel surgery materials provided by using a multimetric approach.
    MATERIALS AND METHODS: A web search using the English term "carpal tunnel surgery" was performed. The first 10 institutional/organizational websites that provided carpal tunnel surgery information in English and Spanish were included. All relevant online materials were evaluated using the Patient Education and Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT), Cultural Sensitivity Assessment Tool (CSAT), and Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook, Spanish (SOL) to assess understandability and actionability, cultural sensitivity, and readability, respectively.
    RESULTS: There were no statistically significant differences in understandability or actionability scores between Spanish and English materials. Average cultural sensitivity scores for Spanish materials were significantly lower than English materials (P = 0.015). The average reading grade level of online English materials was greater than that for Spanish materials (P = 0.011). Both mean values were above the recommended sixth-grade reading level.
    CONCLUSIONS: Online patient-directed information regarding carpal tunnel surgery exceeded the recommended reading grade level for both English and Spanish-speaking populations. Most Spanish materials were often direct translations and were not contoured to the elevated literacy needs of this demographic. Institutions must caution their authors to tailor their web material in a way that is sensitive to their target population to optimize understanding.
    Keywords:  Carpal tunnel surgery; Cultural sensitivity; Health literacy; Patient education; Readability; eHealth
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.01.032
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2024‒11‒22 at 4:18.