bims-librar 2019-04-14 papers

bims-librar

Biomed News

on Biomedical librarianship

Issue of 2019–04–14
sixteen papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society

Handsearching and electronic search of clinical trials in Cuban medical journals: analysis of terminology.
iGeneration's social media usage in retrieving information related to healthcare education: a web-based survey among Italian and Romanian undergraduate medical students.
Effective Multidisciplinary Search Strategies for Assistance Animals: A Librarian's Perspective.
Discovering thematic change and evolution of utilizing social media for healthcare research.
A narrative synthesis on healthcare students use and understanding of social media: Implications for practice.
Equine Caregiver Information-Seeking Preferences: Surveys in the Midwest.
Searching for health equity: validation of a search filter for ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in transport.
Neural sentence embedding models for semantic similarity estimation in the biomedical domain.
NPC POPLINE: A Tool for Population and Reproductive Health Evidence-Based Decisions in Egypt.
[Visualization analysis for radiomics research based on knowledge mapping].
Parental internet search in the field of pediatric orthopedics.
Leveraging Google Trends to investigate the global public interest in rheumatoid arthritis.
Applying deep matching networks to Chinese medical question answering: a study and a dataset.
[The evidential research on the versions of Shanghan Lun Ben Zhi].
Evaluating Literature for Oncology Data Gaps to Improve the Quality of Standard Response Letters: A Retrospective Review.
Social Media in Neurosurgery: Utilizing ResearchGate.

Medwave. 2019 Mar 29. 19(2): e7603

Handsearching and electronic search of clinical trials in Cuban medical journals: analysis of terminology.

Ania Torres-Pombert, Sonia Santana-Arroyo.

   Introduction: Clinical trials are the gold standard for testing the efficacy and safety of interventions. On their own they may not be enough to reach definitive conclusions, but they are the basis for systematic reviews that synthesize the results of several studies. However, once clinical trials have been published, a poor description of the study design and lack of specific key words and descriptors make it difficult to retrieve them by electronic searches, thus requiring hand searching.
Objectives: To compare the retrieving capacity between hand search and the multiple strategies of electronic searches for identifying clinical trials in Cuban medical journals, and to determine the terminology used for describing these studies.
Methods: We combined electronic searches in the Scientific Electronic Library Online of Cuba (SciELO Cuba) and Cuban database Cumed with hand search using the Cochrane guide to locate trials in three Cuban journals in the period 2000-2012. We identified the significant terms included in the title, summary, keywords and methods of each article according to Cochrane, CONSORT, and the health sciences thesaurus.
Results: We identified 50 trials by hand search; four of them were retrieved by electronic search through SciELO Cuba (8%) while none was found through Cumed. The less descriptive sections were the title and the keywords. More keywords than authorized descriptors were used; the only specific concepts used in over half of the retrieved trials were controlled (60%), and study groups (52%); randomi-zed was used in 50% of the retrieved documents. While more specific, the terms clinical trial, phase, and clinical trial registration were not used.
Conclusions: Compared to hand searching, electronic searches are insufficient to identify clinical trials. Therefore, the combination of the two meth-ods is necessary to reach higher retrieval rates. The terminology used to describe clinical trials in the selected journals was deficient due to underutilization of the health sciences thesaurus.

Keywords:   database; information storage and retrieval; clinical trial

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5867/medwave.2019.02.7603
Ann Ist Super Sanita. 2019 Jan-Mar;55(1):55(1): 34-40

iGeneration's social media usage in retrieving information related to healthcare education: a web-based survey among Italian and Romanian undergraduate medical students.

Ariana-Anamaria Cordoş, Sorana D Bolboacă, Rosa Prato, Francesca Fortunato.

The aim of our study was to assess medical undergraduate student's preferences associated with the value of information/learning methods via social media. An electronic questionnaire was developed and applied to undergraduate medical students from two university centers: Foggia (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). 1196 answers were collected, 326 from the Italian university, and 870 from the Romanian university. Students use smartphones to access Facebook, from home, in average 1-3 hours daily. Along with school bibliography and Internet, social media is an active part of the academic life of students. Social media is used to search for information about a specific medical topic or to manage daily student activities. Romanians frequently share information with other colleagues or search for topics related to courses taught at school. The medical students use social media for academic purposes similarly in Italy and Romania.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4415/ANN_19_01_07
Front Vet Sci. 2019 ;6 63

Effective Multidisciplinary Search Strategies for Assistance Animals: A Librarian's Perspective.

Erik Davis Fausak.

  Successful search strategies are based on good background knowledge and a focused clinical research question. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of research involving assistance animals means there is no one universal database to answer all research questions. The topic of assistance animals can yield better results when creating subheadings based on discipline focus. Subheadings have been divided into ethicolegal, sociocultural, psychobehavioral, and medical/veterinary. Each subheading, or discipline, has their own specific databases that will yield higher relevant content than others. Contacting local academic librarians and utilizing search guides created by those librarians can lead to successful search strategies. The goal of this article is to create a template for successful search strategies in assistance animals. Eighty-nine subject guides curated by academic librarians are reviewed to identify strong databases for each topic of ethicolegal, sociocultural, pscyhobehavioral, and medical/veterinary topics in relationship to assistance animals. A live subject guide has been created and maintained at https://www.library.ucdavis.edu/guide/assistance-animals/.

Keywords:  assistant animal; assistive tools; databases; disabilities; service animals; service dogs; subject guides; therapy animals

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00063
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Apr 09. 19(Suppl 2): 50

Discovering thematic change and evolution of utilizing social media for healthcare research.

Xieling Chen, Yonghui Lun, Jun Yan, Tianyong Hao, Heng Weng.

   BACKGROUND: Social media plays a more and more important role in the research of health and healthcare due to the fast development of internet communication and information exchange. This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis to discover the thematic change and evolution of utilizing social media for healthcare research field.
METHODS: With the basis of 4361 publications from both Web of Science and PubMed during the year 2008-2017, the analysis utilizes methods including topic modelling and science mapping analysis.
RESULTS: Utilizing social media for healthcare research has attracted increasing attention from scientific communities. Journal of Medical Internet Research is the most prolific journal with the USA dominating in the research. Overly, major research themes such as YouTube analysis and Sex event are revealed. Themes in each time period and how they evolve across time span are also detected.
CONCLUSIONS: This systematic mapping of the research themes and research areas helps identify research interests and how they evolve across time, as well as providing insight into future research direction.

Keywords:  Healthcare research; Science mapping; Social media; Thematic detection; Thematic evolution; Topic modelling

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0757-4
Nurse Educ Today. 2019 Mar 30. pii: S0260-6917(18)30974-2. [Epub ahead of print]77 40-52

A narrative synthesis on healthcare students use and understanding of social media: Implications for practice.

Colin Ramage, Calvin Moorley.

   OBJECTIVES: The aim of this review was to explore healthcare students' professional and personal use and understanding of social media.
DESIGN AND DATA SOURCES: A comprehensive search was performed in October 2017 using CIHAHL, Academic Search Complete, Education Search Complete, ERIC, MEDLINE and British Education Index. A further search was completed in February 2018 including Google Scholar.
REVIEW METHODS: A summary table was used to organise data by author, year, type of study, methods, findings, limitations, recommendations and additional comments. Qualitative findings were organised into related themes and these were reviewed and discussed amongst the authors to confirm their relevance.
RESULTS: The prevalent themes that emerged were; understanding social media, perceptions of professional & safe social media use, positive aspects of social media and factors influencing social media usage.
CONCLUSIONS: Social media is predominately used by students to communicate with peers and to access course related information. It can provide a collaborative environment which allows engagement and promotion of the nursing profession. Student nurses are generally aware of what constitutes safe and professional social media usage but there remains a need for additional training on how students should navigate the online world as there remains a significant risk of unprofessional behaviours.

Keywords:  Nurse education; Nursing students; Professional development; Social media; Social networking

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2019.03.010
J Equine Vet Sci. 2018 May;pii: S0737-0806(17)30746-3. [Epub ahead of print]64 65-68

Equine Caregiver Information-Seeking Preferences: Surveys in the Midwest.

Heidi K Carroll, Rebecca C Bott-Knutson, Sara L Mastellar.

  Two surveys of equine owners/managers and professionals using convenience sampling via multimodal distribution were conducted on perceptions of equid health and well-being (n = 142) and equine nutrition and feeding practices (n = 151). Surveys were distributed in 2014-2015 (health and well-being) and 2016 (nutrition and feeding) to similar email lists and social media sites; both included questions regarding information-seeking preferences. Respondents were mostly female (62% health and well-being, 84% nutrition and feeding) and had over 20 years of equine ownership/management experience (47% and 61%, respectively). Participants in the Nutrition and Feeding survey reported seeking information from veterinarians (77%), books/magazines (42%), horse enthusiasts (38%), friends/family (35%), Internet/social media (28%), feed company representative (28%), farrier (25%), scientific publications (25%), trainer/instructor (21%), equine nutritionist (19%), equine dentist (7%), extension specialist (7%), and radio (1%). The Health and Well-Being survey requested information regarding participants' likeliness (5-point Likert scale) of trusting various sources for animal well-being information. Respondents from the Health and Well-Being survey indicated veterinarians/nutritionists (average = 4.5) and extension specialists/university personnel (average = 4.0) as their top two trusted sources of information, and local (average = 2.9) and national humane societies/rescues (average = 2.8) their least-trusted sources of information. These results elucidated the information-seeking preferences of horse owners from the Upper Midwest regarding two equine topics. Veterinarians are sought as a source of equine information in the Upper Midwest.

Keywords:  Equine nutrition; Horse owner preference; Information-seeking; Veterinarian; Well-being

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2018.02.006
Syst Rev. 2019 Apr 11. 8(1): 94

Searching for health equity: validation of a search filter for ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in transport.

Jamie Hosking, Alexandra Macmillan, Rhys Jones, Shanthi Ameratunga, Alistair Woodward.

   BACKGROUND: Efforts to improve health equity should be informed by the best available evidence. However, equity-related research is inconsistently indexed, and uses a variety of terms to describe key concepts, making it difficult to reliably identify all relevant studies. We report the development and validation of a search strategy for studies investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status, using the field of transport and health as an example.
METHODS: Adapting previously described methods, we followed four steps: generation of a test set of eligible studies, search strategy development, search strategy validation, and documentation.
RESULTS: Drawing from 12 systematic reviews, supplemented by additional studies identified by experts and colleagues, we identified a test set of 11 studies that met our eligibility criteria. We assigned five studies to a development set, which we used to develop and refine our search strategy. We assigned the remaining six studies to a validation set, against which we tested our final search strategy. The final search strategy identified all studies in both validation and development sets.
CONCLUSIONS: The validated search strategy derived in this study facilitates the conduct of systematic reviews and other literature searches investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status and may be further developed in future for other equity-focused searches and reviews.

Keywords:  Equity; Ethnicity; Socio-economic status; Transport

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-019-1009-5
BMC Bioinformatics. 2019 Apr 11. 20(1): 178

Neural sentence embedding models for semantic similarity estimation in the biomedical domain.

Kathrin Blagec, Hong Xu, Asan Agibetov, Matthias Samwald.

   BACKGROUND: Neural network based embedding models are receiving significant attention in the field of natural language processing due to their capability to effectively capture semantic information representing words, sentences or even larger text elements in low-dimensional vector space. While current state-of-the-art models for assessing the semantic similarity of textual statements from biomedical publications depend on the availability of laboriously curated ontologies, unsupervised neural embedding models only require large text corpora as input and do not need manual curation. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of current state-of-the-art neural sentence embedding models for semantic similarity estimation of sentences from biomedical literature. We trained different neural embedding models on 1.7 million articles from the PubMed Open Access dataset, and evaluated them based on a biomedical benchmark set containing 100 sentence pairs annotated by human experts and a smaller contradiction subset derived from the original benchmark set.
RESULTS: Experimental results showed that, with a Pearson correlation of 0.819, our best unsupervised model based on the Paragraph Vector Distributed Memory algorithm outperforms previous state-of-the-art results achieved on the BIOSSES biomedical benchmark set. Moreover, our proposed supervised model that combines different string-based similarity metrics with a neural embedding model surpasses previous ontology-dependent supervised state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Pearson's r (r = 0.871) on the biomedical benchmark set. In contrast to the promising results for the original benchmark, we found our best models' performance on the smaller contradiction subset to be poor.
CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we have highlighted the value of neural network-based models for semantic similarity estimation in the biomedical domain by showing that they can keep up with and even surpass previous state-of-the-art approaches for semantic similarity estimation that depend on the availability of laboriously curated ontologies, when evaluated on a biomedical benchmark set. Capturing contradictions and negations in biomedical sentences, however, emerged as an essential area for further work.

Keywords:  Natural language processing; Neural embedding models; Semantics

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-2789-2
Open Access Maced J Med Sci. 2019 Mar 15. 7(5): 887-892

NPC POPLINE: A Tool for Population and Reproductive Health Evidence-Based Decisions in Egypt.

Walaa Ahmed Khairy, Nesreen Mohamed Kamal Elden.

   BACKGROUND: Population and Reproductive Health Research (PRHR) should have a crucial role in the policy process in Egypt, providing the evidence for problem identification, priority setting, laying out the alternatives, monitoring and evaluation of implemented evidence-based decisions. Minimally, the practice of evidence-based population and reproductive health requires the access and visibility of such information.
AIM: In response to the current situation, the Egyptian National Population Council in collaboration with the Information and Decision Support Centre of the Egyptian Cabinet developed the first online bilingual PRHR database entitled "NPC POPLINE" aiming at providing a tool for evidence-based decisions in the field of population and reproductive health in Egypt.
METHODS: NPC POPLINE is operated by the electronic Library Information System using MARC21 format. Data was collected from all research centres and institutions conducting PRHR in Egypt; the Egyptian Universities Library Consortium and the international POPLINE database by using structured data collection forms.
RESULTS: NPC POPLINE combines a unique coverage in terms of language (English and Arabic); subject (population and reproductive health) and publication type (peer-reviewed research and grey literature), in addition to the marked search flexibility and the availability of different formats to display the search results.
CONCLUSION: NPC POPLINE goes beyond the definition of an advanced search engine; it can be used to perform bibliometric studies to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative aspects of PRHR conducted in Egypt. Further studies should be initiated to assess the alignment of the database content to the national and international priorities regarding population and reproductive health.

Keywords:  Database; Decision making; Evidence-based; Population; Reproductive health; Research

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3889/oamjms.2019.212
Zhong Nan Da Xue Xue Bao Yi Xue Ban. 2019 Mar 28. 44(3): 233-243

[Visualization analysis for radiomics research based on knowledge mapping].

Aijing Luo, Shanhu Yao, Zhichao Feng, Pengfei Rong, Yuexiang Qin, Wei Wang.

OBJECTIVE: To illustrate the literature distribution, research power distribution, and research hotspots in the radiomics research by using knowledge mapping analysis, and to provide reference for relevant researchers.  Methods: Bibliographies from literature regarding radiomics in Web of Science database were downloaded. BICOM 2.0.1 and SATI 3.2 were used to clean and caculate the frequency of publication year, journal, author, key word, and research institution. CiteSpace V4.4.R1 was used to build the knowledge map of scientific research collaboration network between countries/regions.Ucinet 6 was used to build the knowledge map of scientific research collaboration network between core authors and institutions. gCLUTO 1.0 was applied to construct high-frequency keywords bi-clustering map.  Results: A total of 700 literature was screened. Since 2012 the number of publications has been growing rapidly year by year. The United States, China, and Netherlands were leaders in this field. There were 5 major scientific research institution cooperative groups and 10 major author cooperative groups. Eight research hotspots were clustered by using high-frequency key word bi-clustering analysis.  Conclusion: Radiomics is a new field and develops very fast. More and more countries, research institutions, and researchers with multidisciplinary background are going to participate in this filed. New terminology and new methods are going to appear in the field.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11817/j.issn.1672-7347.2019.03.002
Eur J Pediatr. 2019 Apr 10.

Parental internet search in the field of pediatric orthopedics.

Christian-Dominik Peterlein, Maren Bosch, Nina Timmesfeld, Susanne Fuchs-Winkelmann.

  Parents whose children are affected by systemic diseases, anomalies, deformities, or further orthopedic defective positions use the Internet to increase their knowledge. However, there have been few studies that focus, as this one does, on Internet enquiries done before the parents contact the pediatric orthopedic surgeon. This study analyzed data gathered through a standardized questionnaire on general habits of Internet use, parents' hardware, age, and educational background of the parents. A total of 521 questionnaires were completed for a response rate of 96%. One-quarter of parents (n = 127) attended the consultation because of a gait anomaly or foot deformity, followed by children with DDH (20%, n = 99), clubfoot (9%, n = 47), and scoliosis (6%, n = 29). Parents of children with clubfoot were especially likely to look for health information online (84%, n = 38), followed by parents of children with scoliosis (69%, n = 20), with DDH (67%, n = 66), and with foot deformity/gait anomaly (49%, n = 62). Most people (97%, n = 295) using the Internet for health research purposes made use of a search engine. Concerning use of social media, respondents with clubfoot children were the most numerous (38%, n = 18). There were 35 parents who intended to discuss the results of their Internet research with the pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Most (84%, n = 254) of the respondents who used the Internet for health research planned to do so again.Conclusion: This study documented that the Internet is an important and popular source of information for parents or caregivers in the field of pediatric orthopedics.Level of evidence: Level II; prospective study What is known: •Parents and caregivers often search the Internet for information, particularly before an upcoming operation in the field of orthopedic disorders. What is new: •This study provides recent data on parental Internet research in a large study population.

Keywords:  Cerebral palsy; Clubfoot; DDH; Internet; Pediatric orthopedics; Scoliosis; Social media; Study

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00431-019-03369-w
Rheumatol Int. 2019 Apr 06.

Leveraging Google Trends to investigate the global public interest in rheumatoid arthritis.

Guo-Cui Wu, Sha-Sha Tao, Chan-Na Zhao, Yan-Mei Mao, Qian Wu, Yi-Lin Dan, Hai-Feng Pan.

  This study aims to investigate the global public interest in rheumatoid arthritis by evaluating search term popularity changes of the disease over a decade. Google Trends was applied to retrieve search popularity scores for the term 'rheumatoid arthritis' between January 2004 and December 2017, utilizing the category of "health". Overall, relative searches volume for rheumatoid arthritis steadily decreased from January 2004 to December 2010, and then slowly rose from January 2011 to December 2017. There were significant seasonal variations in relative searches volume for the term 'rheumatoid arthritis' (Amplitude = 3.11; Phase: Month = 4.3; Low point: Month = 10.3; p < 0.025). Relative searches volume peaked in April and reached the lowest level in October. The top 11 rising topics were scleroderma, Anna Marchesini, C-reaction protein, osteoarthritis, arthritis, joint pain, autoimmune disease, rheumatoid factor, rheumatology, methotrexate, and systemic lupus erythematosus, ranking from high to low by relative growth of topic regarding rheumatoid arthritis. In conclusion, the evidence from Google Trends analysis demonstrates a significant seasonal variation in rheumatoid arthritis, with a peak in April. In addition, the top rising search queries are beneficial for physicians to search the Internet themselves for websites that provide high-quality information to recommend to their patients.

Keywords:  Global public interest; Google Trends; Rheumatoid arthritis; Seasonality

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s00296-019-04297-6
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2019 Apr 09. 19(Suppl 2): 52

Applying deep matching networks to Chinese medical question answering: a study and a dataset.

Junqing He, Mingming Fu, Manshu Tu.

   BACKGROUND: Medical and clinical question answering (QA) is highly concerned by researchers recently. Though there are remarkable advances in this field, the development in Chinese medical domain is relatively backward. It can be attributed to the difficulty of Chinese text processing and the lack of large-scale datasets. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces a Chinese medical QA dataset and proposes effective methods for the task.
METHODS: We first construct a large scale Chinese medical QA dataset. Then we leverage deep matching neural networks to capture semantic interaction between words in questions and answers. Considering that Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) tools may fail to identify clinical terms, we design a module to merge the word segments and produce a new representation. It learns the common compositions of words or segments by using convolutional kernels and selects the strongest signals by windowed pooling.
RESULTS: The best performer among popular CWS tools on our dataset is found. In our experiments, deep matching models substantially outperform existing methods. Results also show that our proposed semantic clustered representation module improves the performance of models by up to 5.5% Precision at 1 and 4.9% Mean Average Precision.
CONCLUSIONS: In this paper, we introduce a large scale Chinese medical QA dataset and cast the task into a semantic matching problem. We also compare different CWS tools and input units. Among the two state-of-the-art deep matching neural networks, MatchPyramid performs better. Results also show the effectiveness of the proposed semantic clustered representation module.

Keywords:  Chinese word segmentation; Convolutional neural networks; Deep learning; Medical question answering; Semantic matching

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0761-8
Zhonghua Yi Shi Za Zhi. 2019 Jan 28. 49(1): 29-33

[The evidential research on the versions of Shanghan Lun Ben Zhi].

X M Zhang.

  Shanghan Lun Ben Zhi(, Essential intention of Treatise on Febrile Diseases Caused by Cold) have many versions: the edition of Yanshan bookstore was published in the 16th year of Daoguang (1836); the edition of Juwentang was published during the Tongzhi period; the lithographic printing of Licheng Sanyou Yizhai was published in the 1st year of Xuantong (1909); the Qiu Jisheng's edition was published in the 8th year of the Republic of China (1919); the lithographic printing of Shaoxing Moruntang book court was published in the 18th year of the Republic of China (1929); the photocopy of lithographic printing of Licheng Sanyou Yizhai in the 1st year of Xuantong (1909) was published by Taiwan Freedom Press in 1973; the photocopy of Juwentang's edition during the Tongzhi period was published through Xuxiu Siku Quanshu(, Continuation of Complete Library of Four Branches of Literature) by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House in 2002; the photocopy of Tongzhi's edition was published through Zhongyi Guji Zhenben Jicheng (, Integration of Ancient Books of Traditional Chinese Medicine: continued) by Hunan Science and Technology Publishing House in 2014; the point collation edition of Xuxiu Siku Quanshu Shanghan Lei Yizhu Jicheng(, Continuation of the Integration of Typhoid Medical Works in Complete Library of Four Branches of Books) was published by Jiangsu Science and Technology Press in 2010. The description of Sibu Zonglu Yiyao Bian(, Four general catalogues medical editorial) was recorded in Daoguang's 16th year (1836) of Yanshan bookstore as "the edition of Qing Daoguang's 15th year Yiwei" ; in addition, Zhongguo Zhongyi Guji Zongmu(, Chinese traditional medicine ancient books general catalogue) was recorded in Daoguang's 16th year (1836) of Yanshan bookstore as "the Yanshan bookstore engraved edition in Qingdaoguang's 15th year Yiwei (1835)" , but they were both errors. The photocopy Tongzhi edition of Xuxiu Siku Quanshu was mistakenly entitled "edition of Qing Daoguang Lithography of Yanshan Bookstore Print" . The description of Shanghan Lun Ben Zhi in Zhongguo Zhongyi Guji Zongmu had the edition of Qing Daoguang's 9th year Jichou (1829) and the edition of Guangdong Dasheng pharmaceutical bureau of the Republic of China.

Keywords:  Huoren Xinshu; Shanghan Lun Ben Zhi; Yimen Banghe Erji; Yimen Banghe Sanji; Zhang Nan

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3760/cma.j.issn.0255-7053.2019.01.006
Ther Innov Regul Sci. 2019 Apr 09. 2168479019841319

Evaluating Literature for Oncology Data Gaps to Improve the Quality of Standard Response Letters: A Retrospective Review.

Shanada Monestime.

   BACKGROUND: Medical information departments are responsible for maintaining standard response letters to address health care providers' inquiries. Several factors, including Food and Drug Administration regulations, insufficient diversity in clinical trials, and stringent exclusion criteria, might limit the information available to respond to unsolicited requests. However, if new data becomes available for an inquiry that was previously unanswered, it is not common practice for medical information departments to provide an updated response to health care providers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of reviewing literature to provide an updated response to health care providers.
METHODS: We conducted a 1-year retrospective review of medical inquiries regarding a Bristol-Myers Squibb oncology product. We identified medical inquiry responses that were missing data via our metrics reporting software and conducted an internal and external literature search to assess if new data became available.
RESULTS: Of 21,264 unsolicited global inquiries, data were unavailable for 531 (2.7%). The 3 most frequently observed inquiry topics were "use in special populations" (32%), "drug interactions" (27%), and "adverse events and safety" (23%). After performing an internal and external literature review, we developed standard response letters for 30% of medical inquiries that were previously unanswered.
CONCLUSIONS: Medical information departments serve as a resource to answer product-related questions for health care providers. However, data are not always available to provide a response. On discovery of new data, if medical information departments followed up with health care providers to share new data, this could potentially increase patient safety, build stronger relationships with health care providers, and obtain insights that could influence strategies in future clinical trials and publications.

Keywords:  drug information; medical information; medical inquiries; oncology data gaps; standard response letters

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/2168479019841319
World Neurosurg. 2019 Apr 06. pii: S1878-8750(19)30998-2. [Epub ahead of print]

Social Media in Neurosurgery: Utilizing ResearchGate.

Neil D Joshi, Bryan Lieber, Karren Wong, Eliana Al-Alam, Nitin Agarwal, Vicki Diaz.

   BACKGROUND: Neurosurgery is a unique field, which would benefit greatly from increased global collaboration furthering research efforts. ResearchGate is a social media platform geared towards scientists and researchers.
OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated the utilization of ResearchGate for neurosurgical research collaboration and compared the ResearchGate score with more classical bibliometrics. ResearchGate as a unifying social platform that can strengthen global research collaboration (e.g. data sharing) in the neurosurgery community.
METHODS: Publicly available metrics on a total of 3718 neurosurgery clinical faculty and residents in Canada and United States was obtained from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) website. The following metrics were collected: program name, clinician name, sex, attending (yes or no), resident (yes or no), post-graduate year (if resident), ResearchGate profile (yes or no). ResearchGate score and its components and h-index excluding self-citations were collected. Fellows were not included.
RESULTS: Of the 3718 total individuals included, 1338 (36.0%) were present on ResearchGate, comprised of 181 (13.5%) females and 1157 (86.5%) males. Females and males were present in similar proportions (33.8% of females and 36.3% of males) χ2 (1, N=3718)=1.26, p = 0.26. A greater amount of faculty were present on ResearchGate than residents (62.4%) χ2 (1, N=3718) = 11.42, p=0.001. A very strong, positive monotonic correlation between H-index and ResearchGate score was shown rs (1292)= 0.93, p<0.0005. Over 400 international departments were determined.
CONCLUSION: ResearchGate may be a useful platform to increase neurosurgical networking and research collaboration. Its novel bibliometrics are strongly correlated to more classical ones.

Keywords:  Bibliometrics; Neurosurgery; Research Collaboration; ResearchGate; Social Media

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2019.04.007