bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2019–09–01
ten papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society
  1. Assessment of readability and content of patient-initiated google search results for epidermolysis bullosa.
  2. Young People Seeking Help Online for Mental Health: Cross-Sectional Survey Study.
  3. Pitfalls and Misconducts in Medical Writing.
  4. Health information overload among health consumers: A scoping review.
  5. Dental Websites as New Media Tools for Patients in Dental Health Tourism.
  6. Measuring the effect of different types of unsupervised word representations on Medical Named Entity Recognition.
  7. Financing open-access publication after 2024.
  8. DATA MINING APPROACH FOR EXTRACTION OF USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE COMPOUNDS FROM PUBLICATIONS.
  9. Dentistry and Oral Health in Online Media Sources: A Discourse Analysis.
  10. Influence and use of information sources about childbearing among Spanish pregnant women.
  1. Pediatr Dermatol. 2019 Aug 29.
    Assessment of readability and content of patient-initiated google search results for epidermolysis bullosa.
    Justin L Jia, Betty Nguyen, Kavita Y Sarin.
      Epidermolysis bullosa describes a group of conditions commonly characterized by fragile skin and blistering of the mucosal membranes. Due to the complex and rare nature of the disease, we sought to evaluate the quality and readability of epidermolysis bullosa information available online. Analysis of the top 50 search results on Google demonstrated that information by non-dermatologists was of a lower reading level and more accessible when compared to information by dermatologists, even though dermatologist written information was more likely to be useful and medically comprehensive. There is an increasing need for dermatologists to provide useful and medically comprehensive EB information that is accessible to patients and patient families.
    Keywords:  accessibility; consumer health information; epidermolysis bullosa; health literacy; online health information
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/pde.13975
  2. JMIR Ment Health. 2019 Aug 26. 6(8): e13524
    Young People Seeking Help Online for Mental Health: Cross-Sectional Survey Study.
    Claudette Pretorius, Derek Chambers, Benjamin Cowan, David Coyle.
       BACKGROUND: Young people are particularly vulnerable to experiencing mental health difficulties, but very few seek treatment or help during this time. Online help-seeking may offer an additional domain where young people can seek aid for mental health difficulties, yet our current understanding of how young people seek help online is limited.
    OBJECTIVE: This was an exploratory study which aimed to investigate the online help-seeking behaviors and preferences of young people.
    METHODS: This study made use of an anonymous online survey. Young people aged 18-25, living in Ireland, were recruited through social media ads on Twitter and Facebook and participated in the survey.
    RESULTS: A total of 1308 respondents completed the survey. Many of the respondents (80.66%; 1055/1308) indicated that they would use their mobile phone to look online for help for a personal or emotional concern. When looking for help online, 82.57% (1080/1308) of participants made use of an Internet search, while 57.03% (746/1308) made use of a health website. When asked about their satisfaction with these resources, 36.94% (399/1080) indicated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with an Internet search while 49.33% (368/746) indicated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with a health website. When asked about credibility, health websites were found to be the most trustworthy, with 39.45% (516/1308) indicating that they found them to be trustworthy or very trustworthy. Most of the respondents (82.95%; 1085/1308) indicated that a health service logo was an important indicator of credibility, as was an endorsement by schools and colleges (54.97%; 719/1308). Important facilitators of online help-seeking included the anonymity and confidentiality offered by the Internet, with 80% (1046/1308) of the sample indicating that it influenced their decision a lot or quite a lot. A noted barrier was being uncertain whether information on an online resource was reliable, with 55.96% (732/1308) of the respondents indicating that this influenced their decision a lot or quite a lot.
    CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this survey suggest that young people are engaging with web-based mental health resources to assist them with their mental health concerns. However, levels of satisfaction with the available resources vary. Young people are engaging in strategies to assign credibility to web-based resources, however, uncertainty around their reliability is a significant barrier to online help-seeking.
    Keywords:  Internet; eHealth; health literacy; help-seeking behavior; mHealth; mental health; survey and questionnaires; young adults
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2196/13524
  3. Int J Low Extrem Wounds. 2019 Aug 29. 1534734619870083
    Pitfalls and Misconducts in Medical Writing.
    Miltos K Lazarides, Evangelia Gougoudi, Nikolaos Papanas.
      The objective of medical research is the quest for scientific truth, as well as the communication of new knowledge to the medical society through publication of novel results. Journals publishing these results rely on the trust that all persons involved (authors, peer reviewers, editors, and publishers) remain honest, following the rules and ethics of scientific integrity. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and a wide spectrum of pitfalls and misconducts may occur, ranging from less serious violations of ethical rules to most serious ones. In ascending order of severity, these include borderline questionable practices (HARKing [Hypothesizing After the Results are Known] and hyping), redundant publications, authorship misconducts, plagiarism, and all types of fraud (data falsification or fabrication). Awareness of all these fraudulent practices is essential to mitigate misconduct in academic writing.
    Keywords:  duplicate publication; fraud; medical writing; plagiarism
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/1534734619870083
  4. Patient Educ Couns. 2019 Aug 12. pii: S0738-3991(19)30324-6. [Epub ahead of print]
    Health information overload among health consumers: A scoping review.
    Israa Khaleel, Barbara C Wimmer, Gregory M Peterson, Syed Tabish Razi Zaidi, Erin Roehrer, Elizabeth Cummings, Kenneth Lee.
       OBJECTIVE: To examine and identify the scope of research addressing health information overload in consumers.
    METHODS: In accordance with a published protocol, six electronic databases (PubMed, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, Embase, and Scopus), reference lists of included articles, and grey literature (Google Advanced Search and WorldCat) were searched. Articles in English were included, without any limit on the date of publication.
    RESULTS: Of the 69 records included for final analysis, 22 studies specifically examined health information overload, whereas the remainder peripherally discussed the concept alongside other concepts. The 22 studies focused on one or more of the following: 1) ways to measure health information overload (multi-item/single-item scales); 2) predictors of health information overload - these included low education level, health literacy, and socioeconomic status; and 3) interventions to address information overload, such as videotaped consultations or written materials. Cancer information overload was a popular topic amongst studies that focused on information overload.
    CONCLUSION: Based on the identified studies, there is a clear need for future studies that investigate health information overload in consumers with chronic medical conditions other than cancer.
    PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: This review is the initial step in facilitating future efforts to create health information that do not overload consumers.
    Keywords:  Consumers; Health information; Information overload; Patients; Scoping review; Self-management
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2019.08.008
  5. Acta Inform Med. 2019 Jun;27(2): 128-132
    Dental Websites as New Media Tools for Patients in Dental Health Tourism.
    Busra Kopmaz, Nur Sisman Kitapci, Okan Cem Kitapci, Seyma Birke Bulu, Pinar Kilic Aksu, Leyla Koksal, Gonca Mumcu.
       Introduction: Nowadays, potential patients surf the internet to check the websites of health care organizations to select the most suitable health organization for their needs within the perspective of health tourism. To this effect, dental health tourism as a subset of health tourism is considered to be a developing sector.
    Aim: The aim of the study was to assess whether websites are effectively used as media tools by dental health care organizations, which serve as currently active as well as promising components of health tourism in Turkey.
    Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 555 websites of dental health care organizations were examined. Web pages were evaluated by using E-Information Quality Scale of the Health Centre. A low score indicates well-designed websites.
    Results: Scores related to "contact information" and "website layout" were lower in the private ones (n:146) than the public institutions (n:409)(p=0.000, p=0.011). It was observed that 80.8% (n:122) of the websites with foreign language options (n:151), were private institutions); whereas, public institutions only constitute 19.2% (n:29) of the total. All sub-group scores in the scale were lower in the organizations offering foreign language alternatives in contrast to the ones without foreign language options (p<0.05).
    Conclusion: In private dental health care organizations," contact information" and "website layout" of websites were observed to be the most prominent features in the conduct of public relations activities. Websites with foreign language alternatives were well-designed due to the fact that language options were considered to be an incentive for the health tourists.
    Keywords:  Dental health tourism; health tourism; healthcare institutions; websites
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5455/aim.2019.27.128-132
  6. Int J Med Inform. 2019 Sep;pii: S1386-5056(18)31031-1. [Epub ahead of print]129 100-106
    Measuring the effect of different types of unsupervised word representations on Medical Named Entity Recognition.
    Arantza Casillas, Nerea Ezeiza, Iakes Goenaga, Alicia Pérez, Xabier Soto.
       BACKGROUND: This work deals with Natural Language Processing applied to the clinical domain. Specifically, the work deals with a Medical Entity Recognition (MER) on Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Developing a MER system entailed heavy data preprocessing and feature engineering until Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) emerged. However, the quality of the word representations in terms of embedded layers is still an important issue for the inference of the DNNs.
    GOAL: The main goal of this work is to develop a robust MER system adapting general-purpose DNNs to cope with the high lexical variability shown in EHRs. In addition, given that EHRs tend to be scarce when there are out-domain corpora available, the aim is to assess the impact of the word representations on the performance of the MER as we move to other domains. In this line, exhaustive experimentation varying information generation methods and network parameters are crucial.
    METHODS: We adapted a general purpose sequential tagger based on Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory cells and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) in order to make it tolerant to high lexical variability and a limited amount of corpora. To this end, we incorporated part of speech (POS) and semantic-tag embedding layers to the word representations.
    RESULTS: One of the strengths of this work is the exhaustive evaluation of dense word representations obtained varying not only the domain and genre but also the learning algorithms and their parameter settings. With the proposed method, we attained an error reduction of 1.71 (5.7%) compared to the state-of-the-art even that no preprocessing or feature engineering was used.
    CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that dense representations built taking word order into account leverage the entity extraction system. Besides, we found that using a medical corpus (not necessarily EHRs) to infer the representations improves the performance, even if it does not correspond to the same genre.
    Keywords:  Electronic Health Records; Health Information Systems; Medical Named Entity Recognition; Neural network
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2019.05.022
  7. Nature. 2019 Aug;572(7771): 586
    Financing open-access publication after 2024.
    John-Arne Røttingen, David Sweeney.
      
    Keywords:  Funding; Publishing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02547-y
  8. J Chem Inf Model. 2019 Aug 27.
    DATA MINING APPROACH FOR EXTRACTION OF USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE COMPOUNDS FROM PUBLICATIONS.
    Olga A Tarasova, Nadezhda Yu Biziukova, Dmitry A Filimonov, Vladimir V Poroikov, Marc C Nicklaus.
      A lot of high quality data on the biological activity of chemical compounds are required throughout the whole drug discovery process: from development of computational models of structure-activity relationship to experimental testing of lead compounds and their validation in clinic. Currently a large amount of such data is available from databases, scientific publications, and patents. Biological data are characterized by incompleteness, uncertainty and low reproducibility. Despite the existence of free and commercially available databases of biological activities of compounds, they usually lack unambiguous information about peculiarities of biological assays. On the other hand, scientific papers are the primary source of new data disclosed to the scientific community for the first time. In this study, we have developed and validated a data mining approach for extraction of text fragments containing description of bioassays. We have used this approach to evaluate compounds and their biological activity reported in scientific publications. We have found that categorization of papers into relevant and irrelevant may be performed based on the machine learning analysis of the abstracts. Text fragments extracted from the full texts of publications allow their further partitioning into several classes according to the peculiarities of bioassays. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to the comparison of the endpoint values of biological activity and cytotoxicity of reference compounds.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.9b00164
  9. Community Dent Health. 2019 Aug 29. 36(3): 221-228
    Dentistry and Oral Health in Online Media Sources: A Discourse Analysis.
    A C L Holden.
       BACKGROUND: This analysis examines the discourses within online media that relate to dentistry and oral health, contributing to developing understanding of the underlying social and political contexts that may affect the promotion of oral health. The increased mediatisation of society means that media representations of the dental profession and oral health are of increasing importance.
    METHODS: A search for online media sources relevant to dentistry and oral health was carried out using Google News. Discourse analysis was used to explore online media sources that discussed oral health, the dental profession and dentistry more generally.
    RESULTS: 171 articles were included, and three overarching discourses were identified from the selected online sources; 1) Power and Professional Status; 2) Advancement of Social Control and; 3) Neo-liberal Attitudes Towards Oral Healthcare.
    CONCLUSIONS: The theory of the social contract provides a conceptual framework to explore the relationship between the dental profession and society, the nature of this is discoverable through analysis of the discourses within online media. Within the sources examined, the dental profession frequently invokes neo-liberal discourses that place personal responsibility to be an important factor in preventative oral health. There was also frequent suggestion of a stronger link between oral and systemic health than is evidenced within the academic literature. Analysis of the media sources examined also suggests that the representations of oral health and dentistry also serve to reinforce the artificial separation of the mouth and the body, with dental services being separate from other healthcare activities.
    Keywords:  Dentistry; Discourse Analysis; Media; Oral Health; Social Contract
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1922/CDH_4623Holden08
  10. Women Birth. 2019 Aug 22. pii: S1871-5192(19)30317-8. [Epub ahead of print]
    Influence and use of information sources about childbearing among Spanish pregnant women.
    Francisca Camacho-Morell, Javier Esparcia.
       BACKGROUND: Pregnant women create their childbirth expectations from their available information. Therefore, they should have access to reliable and quality medical information. However, the literature points a knowledge gap with respect to the sources of information used by them.
    OBJECTIVES: The primary objective was to analyse the most influential and widely used sources of information about childbearing in Spanish pregnant women. The secondary objectives were to assess the quality and usefulness of the information sources, to identify those regarded as deficient by pregnant women and to discover differences in information use related to parity.
    DESIGN AND METHODS: A cross-sectional descriptive study was undertaken involving the administration of questionnaires to 40 primiparous and 40 multiparous (taking into account their first and second pregnancy). Social Network Analysis was used, as well as descriptive and inferential statistics for secondary objectives.
    RESULTS: Midwives were the most widely used (degree 0.988) and influential source of information (degree 0.600). Although the Internet was very much used (degree 0.738), its influence was very limited (degree 0.050). Healthcare professionals provided the most useful and highest quality information. Statistically significant differences have been found between first and second pregnancy of multiparous women in relation to the utilisation of some sources of information.
    CONCLUSIONS: Midwives were identified as the key professionals for informing pregnant women. The most influential sources were always people (this underscoring the importance of the face-to-face contact in the search for information). Although new technologies offered support, were unable to replace the information provided by healthcare professionals.
    Keywords:  Decision making; Nurse midwives; Pregnant women; Social Network Analysis; Sources of information
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2019.08.003
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2024‒11‒22 at 4:18.