PhillyHealthInfo.org has a calendar of town hall meetings in the Philadelphia area inspired by Unnatural Causes, a 7-part PBS series about how social, economic, and racial unfairness lead to poor health.
Jeffersonians can watch the entire series online through the AISR Learning Resources Media Server.
Micromedex offers a Quick Tip every other month. The latest, #11, is about a free tutorial for people who use Carenotes to generate patient handouts.
Speaking of Micromedex… a recent analysis published in BMC Infectious Diseases found it performed well against competing products:
Polen HH, Zapantis A, Clauson KA, Jebrock J, Paris M. Ability of online drug databases to assist in clinical decision-making with infectious disease therapies. BMC Infect Dis 2008 Nov 6;8(1):153.
ArcView GIS software is now available in the Scott LRC. For background, the library has a copy of GIS tutorial for health published by ESRI, the maker of the software. New this week is a book that concentrates not on the software but the principles of GIS. Reference copies are available in the Edison and Scott LRCs and one copy is available for 3-week loan: A Primer of GIS: Fundamental Geographic and Cartographic Concepts.
From the preface:
This book provides a conceptual introduction to GIS without requiring the use of GIS software. Through practical examples and exercies, regardless of your educational background or interests, you will find in this book detailed introductions to theories, concepts, and skills you will need to prepare for working with GIS.
Yesterday’s New York Times had a piece on the progress of the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Jefferson users have access to the current edition, DSM-IV, as well as all past editions in Psychiatry Online.
Psychiatry Online provides access to all editions of the DSM
The Scopus database has excellent affiliation searching, so departments can easily locate publications by their faculty members. Among other things, the librarians use this to see where our authors are publishing.
Wordle is a free website where you can create your own tag clouds — images in which words appear larger or smaller depending on their frequency. You can paste in text from a document and may get a graphical depiction of the main concepts.
Here’s a fun application: we plugged into Wordle the titles of articles from Thomas Jefferson University’s Department of Radiology published in 2007 or 2008, identified using Scopus’ affiliation search.
And here’s what we got:
Here’s a RefShare bibliography of the included titles. Try it yourself with the text of an article or titles of publications by a particular author.
