bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2020–12–06
nine papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society



  1. Health Info Libr J. 2020 Nov 30.
      This paper reviews Shane Godbolt's work as the National Health Service (NHS) Regional Librarian in North Thames and London between 1992 and 2003. It was a challenging time for both the NHS and the world of health care librarianship, and this article describes how the opportunities presented by continual organisational change and new ways of working were fully grasped by Shane and her colleagues to move library and information services forward in the capital, working in partnership with NHS partners and Higher Education - and laying the foundations for today's NHS library and knowledge service.
    Keywords:  collaboration; health science; librarianship; national health service (NHS); regional strategies
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12340
  2. Health Info Libr J. 2020 Nov 30.
      In 1978, the UK Library Association's newly formed Medical, Health and Welfare Libraries Group decided to establish a newsletter for its members. This paper sets out to describe how that newsletter evolved into Health Libraries Review (subsequently Health Information and Libraries Journal) and became the premier European journal for health-care information professionals. Drawing on both published accounts and personal reminiscences, it focuses on the role played by Shane Godbolt as the Review's founding editor. It analyses and discusses the factors that influenced her work, and concludes by summarising the lasting importance of her achievements as editor.
    Keywords:  communication; continuing professional development (CPD); information dissemination; librarianship, health science; professional associations; publishers and publishing; scholarly communication
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12339
  3. F1000Res. 2020 ;9 1224
      Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings. However, the management of these raw data presents technical challenges and their analysis suffers from bottlenecks. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can perform all the data processing needed by ecologists for analysing large acoustic data sets. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present BioSounds: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed by ecologists and built by software engineers. Biosounds can be used for archiving and sharing recordings, manually creating and reviewing annotations of sonant animals in soundscapes, analysing audio in time and frequency, and storing reference recordings for different taxa. We present its features and structure, and compare it with similar software. We describe its operation mode and the workflow for typical use cases such as the analysis of bird and bat communities sampled in soundscape recordings. BioSounds is available from: https://github.com/nperezg/biosounds.
    Keywords:  Soundscape; audio annotation; automated sound recording; autonomous recording units; ecoacoustics; passive acoustic monitoring; sound analysis; spectrogram
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26369.1
  4. Heart Lung. 2020 Nov 26. pii: S0147-9563(20)30442-8. [Epub ahead of print]50(2): 182-184
      
    Keywords:  Exclusion criteria; Human filter; Inclusion criteria; Inter-rater reliability; Meta-analysis; Screening; Systematic review
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrtlng.2020.11.002
  5. J Comput Soc Sci. 2020 Nov 22. 1-7
      The COVID-19 pandemic represented an unprecedented setting for the spread of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse, with the potential to cause dramatic real-world consequences. The aim of this special issue was to collect contributions investigating issues such as the emergence of infodemics, misinformation, conspiracy theories, automation, and online harassment on the onset of the coronavirus outbreak. Articles in this collection adopt a diverse range of methods and techniques, and focus on the study of the narratives that fueled conspiracy theories, on the diffusion patterns of COVID-19 misinformation, on the global news sentiment, on hate speech and social bot interference, and on multimodal Chinese propaganda. The diversity of the methodological and scientific approaches undertaken in the aforementioned articles demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of these issues. In turn, these crucial endeavors might anticipate a growing trend of studies where diverse theories, models, and techniques will be combined to tackle the different aspects of online misinformation, manipulation, and abuse.
    Keywords:  Abuse; COVID-19; Infodemics; Misinformation; Social bots; Social media
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00094-5
  6. Am J Infect Control. 2020 Nov 28. pii: S0196-6553(20)31031-2. [Epub ahead of print]
       BACKGROUND: SARS-CoV-2 has spread rapidly resulting in a global pandemic and public health crisis. The internet is a frequently used resource for providing patient education materials (PEMs). The aim of this study was to evaluate the readability, content, and quality of web-based PEMs on COVID-19 from U.S. academic medical centers.
    METHODS: The names of U.S. medical schools were obtained from the Association of American Medical Colleges website (n=145). Institutional, hospital, and heath encyclopedia websites associated with each schools' medical center were identified using Google. Readability of COVID-19 PEMs was calculated using three validated indices: (1) Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level, (2) Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, and (3) Gunning Frequency of Gobbledygook. Content was evaluated using a scoring matrix based on materials available on the Center for Disease Control website. The Patient Education Material Assessment Tool for Print (PEMAT-P) was used to assess usability and actionability.
    RESULTS: A total of 141 (97%) PEMs met inclusion criteria and were analyzed for readability, content and quality. The mean readability was above the recommended 6th grade reading level (P<0.001). Content was variable across PEMs. The PEMAT-P scores reflected good understandability with a median score of 83% (IQR 75-87%), while actionability was poor with a median score of 41% (IQR 40-60%).
    CONCLUSIONS: Despite availability of web-based PEMs for COVID-19, the readability was significantly higher than the NIH and USDHHS recommended 6th grade reading level and actionability of PEMs was low. It is critical to provide readable patient education materials on COVID-19 to effectively disseminate accurate information and facilitate patients' understanding of the virus, how it spreads, and how to protect themselves.
    Keywords:  COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; patient education materials; readability
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2020.11.023
  7. Arthroscopy. 2020 Dec;pii: S0749-8063(20)30656-3. [Epub ahead of print]36(12): 3048-3049
      Providing accurate information to patients regarding health conditions, treatment options, and prognosis is a crucial aspect of medical management and an ethical obligation. Office visits may be limited due to time constraints imposed by scheduling, which may result in missed opportunities to provide extensive information when history, physical examination, review of diagnostic testing, and planning is required. As the Internet is now an established platform and easily accessible, patients are increasingly seeking information from websites out of curiosity and for additional questions pertaining to their health condition. However, the reliability and accuracy of anterior cruciate ligament videos on YouTube are of evidence-based very low quality and reliability.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arthro.2020.07.042
  8. ChemRxiv. 2020 Nov 26.
      <b>Objective:</b> The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed a widespread effort to identify drug candidates and biological targets of relevance to SARS-COV-2 infection, which resulted in large numbers of publications on this subject. We have built the <b><u>CO</u></b>VID-19 <b><u>K</u></b>nowledge <b><u>E</u></b>xtractor (COKE), a web application to extract, curate, and annotate essential drug-target relationships from the research literature on COVID-19 to assist drug repurposing efforts. <b>Materials and Methods:</b> SciBiteAI ontological tagging of the COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a repository of COVID-19 scientific publications, was employed to identify drug-target relationships. Entity identifiers were resolved through lookup routines using UniProt and DrugBank. A custom algorithm was used to identify co-occurrences of protein and drug terms, and confidence scores were calculated for each entity pair. <b>Results:</b> COKE processing of the current CORD-19 database identified about 3,000 drug-protein pairs, including 29 unique proteins and 500 investigational, experimental, and approved drugs. Some of these drugs are presently undergoing clinical trials for COVID-19. <b>Discussion:</b> The rapidly evolving situation concerning the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a dramatic growth of publications on this subject in a short period. These circumstances call for methods that can condense the literature into the key concepts and relationships necessary for insights into SARS-CoV-2 drug repurposing. <b>Conclusion:</b> The COKE repository and web application deliver key drug - target protein relationships to researchers studying SARS-CoV-2. COKE portal may provide comprehensive and critical information on studies concerning drug repurposing against COVID-19. COKE is freely available at <a href="https://coke.mml.unc.edu/">https://coke.mml.unc.edu/</a> and the code is available at <a href="https://github.com/DnlRKorn/CoKE">https://github.com/DnlRKorn/CoKE</a>.
    Keywords:  CORD-19; COVID-19; COVID-19 data; Drug-target-disease associations; knowledge acquisition; text mining
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.13289222.v1
  9. JMIR Med Inform. 2020 Dec 02. 8(12): e23854
       BACKGROUND: Given the increasing availability of the internet, it has become a common source of health information. However, the effect of this increased access on health needs to be further studied.
    OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the correlation between online health information-seeking behavior and general health dimensions in a sample of high school students in Iran.
    METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2019. A total of 295 female students participated in the study. The data were collected using two validated questionnaires: the e-Health Impact Questionnaire and the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey. The collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficients using SPSS version 23 (IBM Corp).
    RESULTS: The participants moderately used online information in their health-related decisions, and they thought that the internet helped people in health-related decision making. They also thought that the internet could be used to share health experiences with others. Participants had moderate confidence in online health information and stated that the information provided by health websites was moderately understandable and reliable and moderately encouraged and motivated them to play an active role in their health promotion. Nevertheless, the results showed that online health information-seeking experience had no significant correlation with health-related quality of life.
    CONCLUSIONS: This study provides insights into the effect of using internet information on the health of adolescents. It has important implications for researchers and policy makers to build appropriate policies to maximize the benefit of internet access for health.
    Keywords:  SF-36; general health; health literacy; high school students; information seeking behavior; online health information
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.2196/23854