Duke Medical Center Library & Archives News

As strategic planning is underway, our staff will be reaching out to you and asking the BIG questions:

How can we further your work at Duke?
What challenges can we help you overcome?
What services are the most valuable to you and what is missing?
What additional expertise do we need on our staff?
What additional resources can we provide – technology, software, mobile apps, other?
How can our facility better serve the Duke community?

Below are some of the opportunities and roles we are considering, but I welcome your ideas and suggestions for our future strategic priorities!

• More fully participating in systematic reviews, searches, and beyond
• Serving as partners in research teams
• Providing free access to materials…

Randy’s Bio

• Working at Duke University Medical Center Library & Archives since:  2001 (employed at Duke since 1989)
• Education: Jordan High School Class of 1988
• Current position: Senior Library Assistant

Q & A

1.    Describe your current position & what you find most interesting about it.
What I like most about my job is being able to connect with the patron, mainly with a joke to loosen up their day.

2.    Describe yourself in three words. …

A systematic review attempts to collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question. The key characteristics of a systematic review are: a clearly defined question with inclusion and exclusion criteria; rigorous and systematic search of the literature; critical appraisal of included studies; data extraction and management; analysis and interpretation of results; and report for publication.

Not every research question fits well with the systematic review methodology. Other types of reviews might be better suited for research questions that are broader or that may not have much empirical evidence on the topic.

What does it take to do a systematic review?

• …

Tags: systematic reviews

Congratulations to Paul Modrich, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry, for winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry!

Read some of his groundbreaking research in DNA repair on his Scholars@Duke page or peruse this PubMed search of his publications.

More and more funding agencies have policies for sharing citations arising from their funding, AND more and more grants are focusing on team-science and collaborative projects. This has resulted in more authors writing articles that may not include the principal investigator.

You can track many biomedical publications by setting up searches in PubMed that run on a regular basis.

• Search for one grant number or several by using “OR” between the grant numbers 
• You can leave off the activity code…

Tags: grants

Natural Standard and Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database are now collectively known as Natural Medicines. The Library subscribes to this database to give Duke affiliated healthcare providers an authoritative resource on dietary supplements, natural medicines, and complementary, alternative, and integrative therapies.

Natural Medicines provides a wealth of information including:

• Clinically relevant, bottom-line-focused information and ratings via evidence-based natural ingredient monographs
• Over 90,000+ new commercial products, including product data and an evidence-…

Categories: Databases, Resource Updates

Tags: alternative medicine

Duke Medicine’s primary news publication from 1953 to 1986, the Intercom, is available online. It features information about campus construction and events, faculty and staff news, facts and figures, and articles about medical research and innovations at Duke.

The Archives collaborated with the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center on this project, who digitized the first 25 years of the publication, making more than 500 issues available online. They can be accessed via MEDSpace, the Duke Medicine digital repository,…

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: archives

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