bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2019–04–07
23 papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society



  1. Kans J Med. 2018 Nov;11(4): 95-101
       Introduction: This study sought to assess the quality of online consumer health information about idiopathic scoliosis. Previous studies showed that quality of online health information varies and often lacks adherence to expert recommendations and guidelines. Nevertheless, 72% of internet users seek health information online. A 2005 analysis of online scoliosis information found that the information was limited and of poor quality.
    Methods: Two reviewers vetted the top 10 websites resulting from a GoogleTM search for "scoliosis." Content was organized into categories and rated by three physician evaluators using a 1 - 5 scale based on quality, accuracy, completeness of information, readability, and willingness to recommend. Additional information, such as number of ads and Flesch-Kinkaid reading level, also was collected.
    Results: The average overall physician score was 47.6 (75 possible). All websites included content that was mostly accurate but varied in completeness. Physicians unanimously recommended Mayo Clinic, MedicineNet, and Kids Health; none recommended the GoogleTM Knowledge Graph. The Scoliosis Research Society website reached the highest overall physician score. Readability ranged from 7th grade to college level; only that of Kids Health was below 10th grade level.
    Conclusions: Most essential information provided by the websites was accurate and generally well rated by physicians. Website ranking by physicians was inconsistent with the ranking order by GoogleTM, indicating that health seekers reviewing the top GoogleTM-ranked websites may not be viewing the websites rated highest by physicians. Physicians should consider patient literacy in website recommendations, as many have an above average literacy level.
    Keywords:  consumer health information; eHealth; internet; patient education; scoliosis
  2. Cureus. 2019 Jan 19. 11(1): e3918
      Background There is increasing concern among healthcare communities about the misinformation online about using cannabis to cure cancer. We have characterized this online interest in using cannabis as a cancer treatment and the propagation of this information on social media. Materials & methods We compared search activity over time for cannabis and cancer versus standard cancer therapies using Google Trends' relative search volume (RSV) tool and determined the impact of cannabis legalization. We classified news on social media about cannabis use in cancer as false, accurate, or irrelevant. We evaluated the cannabis-related social media activities of cancer organizations. Results The online search volume for cannabis and cancer increased at 10 times the rate of standard therapies (RSV 0.10/month versus 0.01/month, p<0.001), more so in states where medical or recreational cannabis is legal. The use of cannabis as a cancer cure represented the largest category (23.5%) of social media content on alternative cancer treatments. The top false news story claiming cannabis as a cancer cure generated 4.26 million engagements on social media, while the top accurate news story debunking this false news generated 0.036 million engagements. Cancer organizations infrequently addressed cannabis (average 0.7 Tweets; 0.4 Facebook posts), with low influence compared to false news (average 5.6 versus 527 Twitter retweets; 98 versus 452,050 Facebook engagements, p<0.001). Conclusions These findings reveal a growing interest in cannabis use as a cancer cure, and a crucial opportunity for physicians and medical organizations to communicate accurate information about the role of cannabis in cancer to patients, caregivers, and the general public.
    Keywords:  alternative medicine; cancer care; cannabis; false news; google trends; online health information; social media
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.3918
  3. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2019 Apr 05. 19(1): 75
       BACKGROUND: Although subjective expressions and linguistic fluency have been shown as important factors in processing and interpreting textual facts, analyses of these traits in textual health information for different audiences are lacking. We analyzed the readability and linguistic psychological and emotional characteristics of different textual summary formats of Cochrane systematic reviews.
    METHODS: We performed a multitrait-multimethod cross-sectional study of Press releases available at Cochrane web site (n = 162) and corresponding Scientific abstracts (n = 158), Cochrane Clinical Answers (n = 35) and Plain language summaries in English (n = 156), French (n = 101), German (n = 41) and Croatian (n = 156). We used SMOG index to assess text readability of all text formats, and natural language processing tools (IBM Watson Tone Analyzer, Stanford NLP Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to examine the affective states and subjective information in texts of Scientific abstracts, Plain language summaries and Press releases.
    RESULTS: All text formats had low readability, with SMOG index ranging from a median of 15.6 (95% confidence interval (CI) 15.3-15.9) for Scientific abstracts to 14.7 (95% CI 14.4-15.0) for Plain language summaries. In all text formats, "Sadness" was the most dominantly perceived emotional tone and the style of writing was perceived as "Analytical" and "Tentative". At the psychological level, all text formats exhibited the predominant "Openness" tone, and Press releases scored higher on the scales of "Conscientiousness", "Agreeableness" and "Emotional range". Press releases had significantly higher scores than Scientific abstracts and Plain language summaries on the dimensions of "Clout", and "Emotional tone".
    CONCLUSIONS: Although the readability of Plain language summaries was higher than that of text formats targeting more expert audiences, the required literacy was much higher than the recommended US 6th grade level. The language of Press releases was generally more engaging than that of Scientific abstracts and Plain language summaries, which are written by the authors of systematic reviews. Preparation of textual summaries about health evidence for different audiences should take into account readers' subjective experiences to encourage cognitive processing and reaction to the provided information.
    Keywords:  Comprehension; Consumer health information; Health literacy; Natural language processing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-019-0716-x
  4. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 81-86
      Providing access to electronic resources is a core service for most libraries, and for more than two decades librarians have used Internet Protocol (IP) addresses as a way to authenticate users and prove they should have access to their institution's licensed materials. But in recent years, IP addresses have become a less accurate method of determining whether a user is affiliated with a particular library. Key players in the publishing industry and academia are working together on a new set of protocols to replace IP authentication called Resource Access for the 21st Century, or RA21. This column will briefly explore what RA21 is, what problems it purports to solve, and what problems it may create. A list of resources for further reading on RA21 is provided.
    Keywords:  Access; EZProxy; IP addresses; RA21; SAML; authentication; electronic publishing; proxies
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1554370
  5. Am J Orthod Dentofacial Orthop. 2019 Apr;pii: S0889-5406(19)30002-2. [Epub ahead of print]155(4): 604-605
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajodo.2018.12.014
  6. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Apr 04. 19(Suppl 3): 68
       BACKGROUND: Online health forums have become increasingly popular over the past several years. They provide members with a platform to network with peers and share information, experiential advice, and support. Among the members of health forums, we define "peer experts" as a set of lay users who have gained expertise on the particular health topic through personal experience, and who demonstrate credibility in responding to questions from other members. This paper aims to motivate the need to identify peer experts in health forums and study their characteristics.
    METHODS: We analyze profiles and activity of members of a popular online health forum and characterize the interaction behavior of peer experts. We study the temporal patterns of comments posted by lay users and peer experts to uncover how peer expertise is developed. We further train a supervised classifier to identify peer experts based on their activity level, textual features, and temporal progression of posts.
    RESULT: A support vector machine classifier with radial basis function kernel was found to be the most suitable model among those studied. Features capturing the key semantic word classes and higher mean user activity were found to be most significant features.
    CONCLUSION: We define a new class of members of health forums called peer experts, and present preliminary, yet promising, approaches to distinguish peer experts from novice users. Identifying such peer expertise could potentially help improve the perceived reliability and trustworthiness of information in community health forums.
    Keywords:  Health forum analysis; Online health communities; Peer experts
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0782-3
  7. Saudi J Anaesth. 2019 Apr;13(Suppl 1): S48-S51
      The institutional integrity constitutes the bases of scientific activity. The frequent incidences of similarity, plagiarism, and retraction cases created the space for frequent use of similarity and plagiarism detecting tools. Turnitin is software that identifies the matched material by checking the electronically submitted documents against its database of academic publications, internet, and previously submitted documents. Turnitin provides a "similarity index," which does not mean plagiarism. The prevalence of plagiarism could not reduce tremendously in the presence of many paid and un-paid plagiarism detecting tools because of the assortment of reasons such as poor research and citation skills, language problems, underdeveloped academic skills, etc., This paper may provide an adequate feedback to the students, researchers, and faculty members in understanding the difference between similarity index and plagiarism.
    Keywords:  Plagiarism; Turnitin; similarity index
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.4103/sja.SJA_772_18
  8. Sci Eng Ethics. 2019 Apr 03.
      Most studies of research integrity in the general media focus on the coverage of specific cases of misconduct. This paper tries to provide a more general, long-term perspective by analysing media discourse about research integrity and related themes in the Italian and United Kingdom daily press from 2000 to 2016. The results, based on a corpus of 853 articles, show that media coverage largely mirrors debates about integrity and misconduct. In fact, salient themes in the news include the importance to overcome the so-called "rotten apple" paradigm; the key role of public trust in science; and the need to address flaws in the peer-review system.
    Keywords:  Daily press; Media analysis; Research integrity; Science communication; Scientific misconduct
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00103-5
  9. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Apr 04. 19(Suppl 3): 78
       BACKGROUND: This paper presents a portable phenotyping system that is capable of integrating both rule-based and statistical machine learning based approaches.
    METHODS: Our system utilizes UMLS to extract clinically relevant features from the unstructured text and then facilitates portability across different institutions and data systems by incorporating OHDSI's OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) to standardize necessary data elements. Our system can also store the key components of rule-based systems (e.g., regular expression matches) in the format of OMOP CDM, thus enabling the reuse, adaptation and extension of many existing rule-based clinical NLP systems. We experimented with our system on the corpus from i2b2's Obesity Challenge as a pilot study.
    RESULTS: Our system facilitates portable phenotyping of obesity and its 15 comorbidities based on the unstructured patient discharge summaries, while achieving a performance that often ranked among the top 10 of the challenge participants.
    CONCLUSION: Our system of standardization enables a consistent application of numerous rule-based and machine learning based classification techniques downstream across disparate datasets which may originate across different institutions and data systems.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0786-z
  10. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 87-96
      The primary goal of this project is to understand how each National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center library, and all libraries that support cancer research, function within their institutions. Through an in-depth survey focused on three major areas (staff, content and tools procurement, and user services), the research team hopes to determine how a cancer-centric library can be successful in supporting quality patient care, research excellence, and education. Additionally, the survey will examine the necessary minimum staffing levels for librarians and information professionals based on organizational size and degree of research focus. The survey will seek out the new skills librarians will need to deliver optimal services. The survey will also explore how content libraries purchase reflects and maps to constituents' current medical and research activities. Libraries within a research intense environment have a responsibility to align with researchers and health care professionals to provide resources and services that support their workflows. Cancer libraries need to be attuned to their institutions' missions, whether that includes excellent patient care, research endeavors, or cutting-edge educational programs. The information gathered from the survey will provide data for this research team to define the vision and standards of excellence for a cancer specialized research library.
    Keywords:  Benchmarking; cancer; cancer centers; hospital libraries; surveys and questionnaires
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2018.1553451
  11. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 70-80
      WormBase is an open-access model-organism database that provides current and accurate genetic information of C. elegans and related nematodes. Users can search WormBase by several fields, including a gene or human disease. A special feature of the database is the inclusion of micropublications, peer-reviewed data that may go unpublished in traditional venues.
    Keywords:  Database review; WormBase; genetics; online databases
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1548896
  12. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 31-40
      Even though the library subscribes to numerous valuable health science resources, many e-books are not being used by clinicians, researchers, and students. Because these resources are bundled in various packages that often do not show up in federated searches, making them more discoverable is important. At the same time, the cost of textbooks is increasingly burdensome for students. Using authoritative lists and metrics to evaluate these resources while also seeking faculty input to include the best resources in subject guides may not only benefit the faculty and students but also aid in promoting library resources.
    Keywords:  Academic health sciences libraries; LibGuides; bibliometrics; e-books; education; library collection management; subject guides
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2018.1547048
  13. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 41-55
      The reasons for implementing and the advantages of switching to the Reference Analytics system, a part of the Springshare LibAnswers platform, for collecting reference statistics at a three-campus university library are described. The benefits of using this web-based product are highlighted based on the comparison with the previously used analytical tools and the annual statistical data. Transitioning to Reference Analytics allowed librarians to take advantage of such features, as seamless access to reference transactions, easy customization, cross-tabulation, and data visualization, proving beneficial for overall library reference services.
    Keywords:  Library statistics; reference services; reference statistics software; reference transactions analysis
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1548892
  14. Bioinformatics. 2019 Apr 05. pii: btz228. [Epub ahead of print]
       MOTIVATION: Figures and captions convey essential information in biomedical documents. As such, there is a growing interest in mining published biomedical figures and in utilizing their respective captions as a source of knowledge. Notably, an essential step underlying such mining is the extraction of figures and captions from publications. While several PDF parsing tools that extract information from such documents are publicly available, they attempt to identify images by analyzing the PDF encoding and structure and the complex graphical objects embedded within. As such, they often incorrectly identify figures and captions in scientific publications, whose structure is often non-trivial. The extraction of figures, captions and figure-caption pairs from biomedical publications is thus neither well-studied nor yet well-addressed.
    RESULTS: We introduce a new and effective system for figure and caption extraction, PDFigCapX. Unlike existing methods, we first separate between text and graphical contents, and then utilize layout information to effectively detect and extract figures and captions. We generate files containing the figures and their associated captions and provide those as output to the end-user.We test our system both over a public dataset of computer-science documents previously used by others, and over two newly collected sets of publications focusing on the biomedical domain. Our experiments and results comparing PDFigCapX to other state-of-the-art systems show a significant improvement in performance, and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.
    AVAILABILITY: A demo system is available at: https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~compbio/PDFigCapX. The fully functional system will be made publicly available with the publication of this manuscript, along with the two new datasets, and the ground-truth image/caption annotations associated with them.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz228
  15. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 1-21
      Health sciences libraries are often challenged to make decisions regarding physical space allocation without quantitative data to support specific user preferences. This multisite, longitudinal study sought to answer the following questions related to academic health sciences libraries: (1) Which library spaces are popular with health sciences patrons? (2) How does time of day and allocated seating space affect patron choices? (3) What similarities and differences occur in space usage across four different health sciences libraries? Results suggest health sciences libraries must develop a nuanced understanding of their patrons' preferences to best serve patrons' needs regarding space allocation. Libraries can benefit from these types of methodological studies that target specific populations, supporting more informed space allocation decision making.
    Keywords:  Data comparison; health sciences libraries; learning environments; library collaboration; medical library trends; multisite; observational study; quantitative study; space comparison; space utilization; study space
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2018.1548890
  16. Br J Hist Sci. 2019 Apr 05. 1-19
      This article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology (as opposed to the older mode of natural history). However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between 'mere collectors' and 'entomologists' as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822-1892), which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087419000050
  17. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 22-30
      Rising collection costs sometimes necessitate tough decisions regarding cancellation of popular products. In 2015-2016, the East Tennessee State University Medical Library subscribed to UpToDate and DynaMed Plus, both clinical point-of-care products, with the understanding that one product would be canceled at the fiscal year end. The librarian team undertook a year-long community engagement campaign to inform library users about the pending product cancellation decision. Ultimately, DynaMed Plus was selected and UpToDate was cancelled. The campaign generated user engagement with the decision making, along with perceived benefits including increased awareness of the library's budget constraints, increased discussion of scholarly publishing, and greater faculty/student knowledge of evaluating evidence-based products.
    Keywords:  Collection development; community engagement; evidence-based medicine; point-of-care resources
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1547055
  18. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 104-109
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1548897
  19. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 56-69
      A transition of content management systems provided Kornhauser Health Sciences Library with an opportunity to redesign the library's website to be more user-friendly, efficient, and visually appealing. A multistage approach was taken: (1) informal interviews of various stakeholders from the library, (2) a redesign using information gained from those stakeholders, and (3) a retrospective comparative usability study. This study was conducted with the goal to inform library staff whether the redesigned website improved accuracy and efficiency of information retrieval through the completion of timed tasks. In addition, user satisfaction was measured through guided interview questions.
    Keywords:  Usability; website design
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2019.1548898
  20. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Apr 04. 19(Suppl 3): 79
       BACKGROUND: Twitter messages (tweets) contain various types of topics in our daily life, which include health-related topics. Analysis of health-related tweets would help us understand health conditions and concerns encountered in our daily lives. In this paper we evaluate an approach to extracting causalities from tweets using natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
    METHODS: Lexico-syntactic patterns based on dependency parser outputs are used for causality extraction. We focused on three health-related topics: "stress", "insomnia", and "headache." A large dataset consisting of 24 million tweets are used.
    RESULTS: The results show the proposed approach achieved an average precision between 74.59 to 92.27% in comparisons with human annotations.
    CONCLUSIONS: Manual analysis on extracted causalities in tweets reveals interesting findings about expressions on health-related topic posted by Twitter users.
    Keywords:  Causal relationships; Causality; Cause-effect; Natural language processing (NLP); Twitter
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0785-0
  21. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2019 Apr 05. 19(1): 76
       BACKGROUND: An important part of the systematic review methodology is appraisal of the risk of bias in included studies. Cochrane systematic reviews are considered golden standard regarding systematic review methodology, but Cochrane's instructions for assessing risk of attrition bias are vague, which may lead to inconsistencies in authors' assessments. The aim of this study was to analyze consistency of judgments and support for judgments of attrition bias in Cochrane reviews of interventions published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR).
    METHODS: We analyzed Cochrane reviews published from July 2015 to June 2016 in the CDSR. We extracted data on number of included trials, judgment of attrition risk of bias for each included trial (low, unclear or high) and accompanying support for the judgment (supporting explanation). We also assessed how many Cochrane reviews had different judgments for the same supporting explanations.
    RESULTS: In the main analysis we included 10,292 judgments and supporting explanations for attrition bias from 729 Cochrane reviews. We categorized supporting explanations for those judgments into four categories and we found that most of the supporting explanations were unclear. Numerical indicators for percent of attrition, as well as statistics related to attrition were judged very differently. One third of Cochrane review authors had more than one category of supporting explanation; some had up to four different categories. Inconsistencies were found even with the number of judgments, names of risk of bias domains and different judgments for the same supporting explanations in the same Cochrane review.
    CONCLUSION: We found very high inconsistency in methods of appraising risk of attrition bias in recent Cochrane reviews. Systematic review authors need clear guidance about different categories they should assess and judgments for those explanations. Clear instructions about appraising risk of attrition bias will improve reliability of the Cochrane's risk of bias tool, help authors in making decisions about risk of bias and help in making reliable decisions in healthcare.
    Keywords:  Attrition bias; Cochrane; Incomplete data; Inconsistency; Missing data; Systematic review
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-019-0717-9
  22. Rev Bras Enferm. 2019 Feb;pii: S0034-71672019000700221. [Epub ahead of print]72(suppl 1): 221-227
       OBJECTIVE: To develop a journal club on management topics in Nursing.
    METHOD: Action research, adopting content analysis as methodological reference and the journal club strategy. 12 nursing managers of a public hospital in the state of São Paulo participated from August to November 2016.
    RESULTS: data showed the participation of nurses in the journal club in five meetings planned collectively with the following topics: "aspects regarding organization", with the subtopics "planning", "work process", "structure" and "people management"; and the topic "aspects regarding the team", with the subtopics "autonomy", "behavior/attitude", "awareness" and "social problems".
    CONCLUSION: The study showed the comprehensiveness of topics the journal club can address regarding management, and how scientific basis is important in the daily life of nursing managers to improve quality of care and the ability to manage.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7167-2018-0019
  23. Med Ref Serv Q. 2019 Jan-Mar;38(1):38(1): 97-103
      With thanks for excellent service to departing co-editor Becky McKay Johnson, this is the first Informatics Education column under the sole current editor. A retrospective analysis of past columns identifies several major themes over the past six years. Different meanings for the term "informatics" are explored, and potential new areas for future Informatics Education columns are proposed.
    Keywords:  Informatics education; health informatics; librarian roles
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2018.1548888