Changes to Current Contents Coming in July

High Quality of School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Role of Expert Searching

New Foundation Directory Online

Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science

VOL. 25 NO. 2	March - April 2004

Library Prepares for New Distance Education Students

During March, preparations began to expand the Library's Evidence-Based Medicine/Use of the Biomedical Literature component of Longitudinal Theme III of the School of Medicine's curriculum to the new distance education students who will enter with the Class of 2008 in August. The new students, who will be located at the campus of Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton for their first two years of medical school, represent the Library's first experience with distance education.

Although lectures by Calder faculty will be broadcast to the Boca Raton campus and the Blackboard course software used for the EBM component will continue to be web-accessible, faculty in the FAU Library will teach the hands-on, small group EBM Medline classes, provide assitance to students as they complete the required assignments, and grade the assignments. John D. Jones, Jr., Reference and Education Librarian at the Calder Library, has assumed responsibility for the day-to-day coordination of the planning and implementation of this new initiative in conjunction with Susan K. Setterlund, Head, Information Literacy and Instructional Services, at the Wimberly Library of FAU.

Changes to Current Contents Coming in July

Effective July 1, 2004, the Library is discontinuing Current Contents Search, its Ovid platform for three Current Contents databases: Life Sciences, Clinical Medicine, and Social & Behavioral Sciences. Thereafter, these three databases will only be available through Current Contents Connect, the ISI Web of Knowledge platform at www.isiknowledge.com.

All Current Contents Search users must reconfigure their saved searches for the new Current Contents Connect platform. Jenny Garcia, at 305-243-6648 or jennygarcia@miami.edu in the Reference and Education Department, is happy to assist you with this necessary reconfiguration.

The primary reason for discontinuing the Ovid platform is its lack of the eFirst citations available on the Current Contents Connect platform at Thomson-ISI, the producer of all existing Web of Knowledge databases. eFirst “provides bibliographic information for peer-reviewed journal articles before the complete issue of the particular print or electronic journal is officially published." These articles usually first appear within ‘advance publication’ sections of electronic journals. In a study of 24 eFirst citations conducted by Ms. Garcia, 16 also appeared in PubMed, but none appeared in the Web of Science, Ovid Medline, or the Biosis databases.

From eFirst records, users can link to the full text of e-journals accessible at the medical center. From all Current Contents Connect records, users can also link to other valuable Web of Knowledge information, such as the thousands of cited references, cited articles and related records in Web of Science, the electronic version of Science Citation Index.

High Quality of School of Medicine Faculty Publications

A list of journals in which University faculty published ten or more papers between 1998 - 2002 appears at scholar.library.miami.edu/facpubs02/journalsrank.html. In an effort to rank the journals in which faculty are publishing frequently, the 2002 impact factor was identified for each title in the biomedical sciences.

Impact factors are widely recognized as an indication of the quality of a particular journal. They are the ratio of the number of times a journal is cited and the number of citable articles published in a given year. The impact factors for journals for 2000 - 2002 are available in the ISI Journal Citation Reports database at isi5.newisiknowledge.com/portal.cgi?DestApp=JCR&Func=Frame.

Following are the 70 journals in which UM faculty published 10 or more papers between 1998-2002 in descending order by impact factor, followed by the number of faculty publications in the five-year time period. Each of the titles on the list is in the top tier of journals in its discipline. Impact factors range from 31.736 for the New England Journal of Medicine to 2.311 for Spine. The wide range in impact factors is largely a reflection of the wide range in the number of issues and papers a journal publishes each year.

On March 10, 2004, nine medical center librarians participated in a Medical Library Association (MLA) teleconference, "Roles and Essential Skills for the Expert Searcher" at South Miami Hospital. Tanya Feddern, one of the participants from the University of Miami, was featured, together with medical librarians from the NIH, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, McMaster, and the Universities of Florida and Missouri-Columbia.

The teleconference and MLA's Policy Statement: Role of Expert Searching in Health Sciences Libraries at www.mlanet.org/resources/expert_search/policy_expert_search.html was occasioned by the recent increased emphasis on evidence-based practice by the Institute of Medicine. Per the policy statement:

Librarians are being recruited to join clinical and research teams as clinical medical librarians and information specialists in context and to provide expert consultation …All require the same knowl- edge base and skill set identified for expert literature searches. The emphasis on evidence-based practice, along with publicity about the need for more vigilance about the quality of literature searching following the unfortunate death of a healthy research volunteer at Johns Hopkins, have underscored the need for this policy document.

At the School of Medicine and at medical centers across the nation, expert searches are a critical component of clinical care and research in settings such as:

• Difficult and complex clinical cases
• Protocol development and review
• Animal welfare
• Subject and Patient safety
• Development of best practice standards and guidelines

Expert searches are available upon request from the Reference and Education Department. Complete the request form at the link along the top of the Library's website; send an e-mail to jennygarcia@miami.edu; call 305-243-6648; or click on the "Ask a Librarian" link during your search of an Ovid database.

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New Foundation Directory Online

The Foundation Center's comprehensive online service became accessible University-wide during March at fconline.fdncenter.org/ip_login.pl. Made possible by the University's Otto G. Richter Library, the Foundation Directory Online offers two searchable databases:

• Data on more than 76,000 corporate giving programs and grantmaking public charities
• Data on more than 350,000 grants awarded by foundations, which reflect a foundation's
  funding interests and giving history.

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Washington D.C. Principles for Free Access to Science

Statement from Not-for-Profit Publishers

On March 16, 2004, approximately 50 scientific, technical, and medical not-for-profit societies, such as the AAP, AACR, ACP, APP, and ASM, endorsed and released a statement on their commitment to "promoting the wide dissemination of information in our journals" to help ensure that scientific communities are sustained and extended, "science is advanced, research meets the highest standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely information." www.dcprinciples.org/.

Key components include:

• "We have introduced and will continue to support the following forms of free access:
• Selected important articles of interest are free online from the time of publication
• The full text …is freely available to everyone worldwide either immediately or within
  months of publication, depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements.
• We strongly support the principle that publication fees should not be borne solely by researchers and
  their funding institutions …. A free society allows for the co-existence of many publishing models.
• We will continue to work to develop long-term preservation solutions for online journals to ensure
  the ongoing availability of the scientific literature."

Many of the same not-for-profit publishers have indicated that they will support the LOCKSS Program, a potentially viable solution to the problem of archiving electronic journals at lockss.stanford.edu/.

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LOUIS CALDER MEMORIAL LIBRARY P.O. BOX 016950 (R-950) MIAMI, FLORIDA 33101 (305) 243-6441 https://www.library.miami.edu/calder/index.html	BIOMEDICAL COMMUNICATIONS P.O. BOX 016960 (R-4) MIAMI, FLORIDA 33101 (305) 243-6783 https://www.library.miami.edu/calder/index.html/biomed