Duke Medical Center Library & Archives Blog

Have you ever wondered where the ingredients in pharmaceuticals are manufactured? Updated quarterly, the FDA’s Drug Master Files (DMFs) contain information about manufacturing, processing, packaging, and storage of human drugs. Submission of a DMF is not required by law or FDA regulation. DMF files are available for download in Excel format. Click here for Guidelines about DMFs.

Tags: drugs

Rarely does a week pass that I don’t get invited to publish in an unknown journal or to present at a conference. I hear from many of you that you are getting the same invitations. While you may be tempted to hit the spam or delete key, some of these journals may be legitimate. How can you tell which are worth pursuing?

Hopefully by now, most authors and readers of academic journals are familiar with the open access model. This model aims to shift the cost of producing academic journals to the author, as opposed to the readers and institutions that subscribe to the journals. Many open access journals offer excellent content in an open and low-cost way, making the research available to more people than a traditional journal…

Tags: publishing

Want to get published in JAMA? One way to improve your chances is to talk to your medical librarian.

In a viewpoint piece published on September 10, 2014, potential and future JAMA authors are encouraged to improve their review articles by summarizing the literature in a more systematic way. Written by a medical librarian, a physician, and the Deputy Editor, Clinical Reviews and Education for JAMA, the article lays out the process for doing so and exhorts authors to collaborate with a medical librarian. Extensive literature searches are difficult, and a medical librarian can provide expertise to facilitate the process, save time, and reduce bias in the…

Tags: journals

While Duke Gardens is one of the most recognized destinations on campus, it’s less well known that the attraction’s origins can be traced back to the medical campus.

The gardens were the idea of Dr. Frederic Hanes (pictured right), a physician who joined Duke in 1930 and became chair of the Department of Medicine in 1933. His daily walks on campus often led him past a debris-filled ravine, the result of a stalled project to create a lake. An avid horticulturist, Hanes had thought that this would be a perfect site for a garden featuring his favorite flower, the iris.

In 1934 Hanes persuaded Sarah Pearson Angier Duke, widow of Benjamin Duke, one of the university’s founders, to donate $20,000 for the…

Tags: archives

The Medical Center Library & Archives has held focus groups in the past 1.5 years to explore the research needs of early-career researchers. 

We conducted four focus groups in which we had a total of 12 participants: 2 graduate students, 5 postdocs, and 5 faculty. The overarching theory we developed was that participants were unaware of or didn't understand many tools, services, and resources available to them through the University and/or Library. 

In support of the larger theory above, participants reported that:

• Finding collaborators was difficult
• Navigating the research process and structure was confusing
• Navigating the grant lifecycle was complex
• Finding and obtaining help at Duke was challenging…

Tags: research

Do you receive NIH funding? If so, you will have to be compliant with the Public Access Policy. Here are some basics for preparing to be compliant, monitoring your article, and handling compliance problems.

1. Login to NCBI and go directly to the option "Sign in with NIH Login" to create an account using your eRA Commons ID and password.
2. If you already have a My NCBI account and do not want to lose citations or searches you have saved, see the detailed instructions in our…

Tags: NIH Public Access Policy

If you haven't seen any of the videos that came out of the AAMC's video challenge, you are missing out!  The 2013 AAMC Annual Meeting asked medical schools to take two minutes to "envision the innovations of tomorrow in academic medicine." Easy, right? 

They had some great submissions, including the winning video from Eastern Virginia Medical School. Their vision of the future of medical education highlights how simulation, self-paced curricula, and interdisciplinary team-based learning would prepare medical students with knowledge of content and technical proficiency in clinical skills. Check out the EVMS video here.

SciENcv or the Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae recently went live.  It is an online professional profile that can be made public to share with others. In SciENcv, users can document their education, employment, research activities, publications, honors, research grants, and other professional contributions. In addition, the SciENcv profile may include an ORCID® iD, when registered with ORCID.

The mission of SciENcv is to create a researcher profile system for all individuals who apply for, receive, or are associated with research investments from federal agencies, in…

Categories: Explore Tools

Tags: for researchers

A recent article in BMC Medical Research Methodology, Google Scholar as Replacement for Systematic Literature Searches: Good Relative Recall and Precision are Not Enough, reports that "Google Scholar is not ready as a professional searching tool for tasks where structured retrieval methodology is necessary." For more details about the study, including its methods and results, see the structured abstract below.

BACKGROUND:
Recent research indicates a high recall in Google Scholar searches for systematic reviews. These reports raised high expectations of Google Scholar as a unified and easy to use search interface. However, studies on the coverage of Google Scholar rarely used the search…

Tags: systematic reviews

The journal Science recently published the results of a "sting operation" that involved sending poor quality research to several Open Access journals. The article, "Who's Afraid of Peer Review," begins with the tantalizing story:

"On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It as the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more…

Tags: open access

Call for Papers for the next issue of the Medical Student Research Journal (MSRJ)!

The MSRJ, sponsored by The College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, is the only  online academic journal in the U.S. operated by medical students for medical students. The MSRJ provides medical students with an excellent opportunity to publish, review manuscripts, or learn about the peer review process and all aspects of journal operations.  All manuscripts undergo a strict peer review by students who have completed specialized training. Manuscript submissions are accepted from medical students worldwide. All articles are indexed and identified with a unique DOI number. The deadline for the next Winter Issue is October 1st, and the deadline for…

Tags: publishing

Pulse--voices from the heart of medicine was launched in 2008 by the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with educators around the country.  Every Friday, Pulse e-mails its readers a first-person story or poem about giving or receiving health care. The pieces are written by patients, physicians, students, nurses and other health professionals.

Pulse is read for…

Zotero (zoh-TAIR-oh) is a free citation management tool that conveniently “lives in” your Web browser, where you do the majority of your work and research. Most commonly, Zotero works as an add-on for the Firefox browser. However, there is a Zotero standalone version that is compatible with Safari and Chrome.

Zotero is easy to use and has many of the same, as well as some unique, features as EndNote and RefWorks.  With Zotero, you can:

• Organize & manage references into searchable collections
• Insert citations as you write using the Zotero word-processing plug-in
• Create formatted bibliographies in many different styles
• Attach PDFs, notes and images to references
• Easily add citations directly from databases and…

Categories: Explore Tools, Resource Updates

Tags: zotero, citation management, endnote, refworks

A hot topic in the news recently is the increasing number of scientific studies that have been discovered to be wrong and are retracted by their publishers. Following that, the October 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that the majority of retractions are due to some type of misconduct, and not just honest mistakes.

The blog Retraction Watch tracks such retractions and has notified its readers of hundreds of journal-article withdrawals.

Retraction Watch uses the motto "Tracking retractions as a window into the…

Categories: Alerts, Explore Tools

A good mystery novel, at its core, consists of interesting characters, a compelling plot, and puzzle-solving.  In these respects, the job of an archivist mirrors that of a detective, as the archivist must reconstruct the pasts of people or objects from fragments of information.  While such mysteries come in a variety of forms, the most common is determining the history, or provenance, of an item or collection.  

Recently a series of paintings in the Medical Center Library’s Artwork Collection posed such a challenge.  The paintings, done in 1944 by Frank Beresford, depict scenes of the U.S. Army 65th General Hospital Unit at work during World War II in the Eastern Theater of Operations (E.T.O.).  Absent from the Library’s inventory…

Tags: archives