UNB Nursing LiBlog

ProQuest is adding videos from MedCom - Trainex on assessment, procedure, care management, anatomy, prevention and other nursing topics. The over 300 videos are broken into 2 to 5 minute chaptered clips which can be viewed in document view, are available in Flash format and can be downloaded for future reference.

To see the videos, go to the e-resources menu at the UNB Libraries website (http://lib.unb.ca) and choose Proquest Nursing and Allied Health Source. At the database homepage, choose the link to Video Training Programs from the Browse Evidence-Based Resources box at the right side of the page.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 3:08 PM | Permalink

A CINAHL User Guide is available for download in pdf format at http://www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/CINAHL_user_guide2008.pdf

The guide is 16 pages long and contains plenty of screen shots and tips for getting the most out of your CINAHL searches.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 2:58 PM | Permalink

The Joanna Briggs Institute has made an arrangement with ProQuest to make their content available through the ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health Source database. This information about the database is from ProQuest:

Joanna Briggs Institute is a not-for-profit institute which manages a collaboration to evaluate evidence for practice in nursing and allied health. This highly sought after information allows practicing nurses and nursing students to see clearly and simply where nursing decisions are supported by evidence. Users will have access to:

* Systematic Reviews- Systematic reviews are summaries of all research on selected clinical topic. The reviews search for relevant information using an explicit, rigorous and comprehensive approach.
* JBI Database of Evidence Summaries- Evidence summaries are short extracts of research literature on selected clinical topics that are based on structured searches of the literature and selected evidence-based health care databases. They focus on the characteristics of the evidence, the clinical bottom line, and best practice recommendations.
* JBI Database of Best Practice Information Sheets (BPIS)- Best practice information sheets are summaries derived from the findings of systematic reviews of evidence. The purpose of the sheets is to condense a large volume of material to assist in busying clinicians to access the best available evidence.

ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source customers will also have access to JBI Connect, hosted by Joanna Briggs Institute. JBI Connect includes access to:

* RAPid-a research tool geared towards helping students critically appraise, summarize and report on evidence for good nursing practice. RAPid also offers them the possibility of publishing their appraisal in the form of a refereed report in the RAPid Library.
* SUMARI-software for nursing academics that supports the critical assessment of the literature enabling the creation of systematic reviews. It also includes tools to create protocols, extract data, and properly analyze that data. This is an opportunity for librarians to support nursing academics in the creation of "publishing-house standard" reviews.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 11:22 AM | Permalink

Two new e-resources of possible interest to Nursing have been added to the UNB Libraries Indexes and Abstracts list (http://www.lib.unb.ca/eresources/Indexes.php).

1. Violence and Abuse Abstracts
Violence & Abuse Abstracts publishes 1,200 abstracts annually, plus an extended bibliography of recent literature on all types of interpersonal violence, including sexual, physical and psychological child abuse, domestic violence, rape, sexual assault and harassment, hate crimes, workplace violence, gang violence, elder abuse and neglect. Each abstract is categorized into one of four distinct sections: medical, legal, psychological and social.

2. PsychiatryOnline
PsychiatryOnline is a website that features DSM-IV-TR and The American Journal of Psychiatry as the cornerstones of a collection of psychiatric references, including books, journals, and self-assessment tools. Much more than individual titles, PsychiatryOnline features sophisticated searching and indexing tools that enable users to quickly target all the information needed. Coverage:1844 - present

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:00 AM | Permalink

The search platform for all of UNB Libraries' Ovid databases changed at the beginning of January. The databases concerned are: CINAHL, Medline, HealthStar, Health & Psychosocial Instruments, EBM Reviews, Books@Ovid, and the Ovid Journals.

The default search mode is Ovid Syntax, which is the same as the Advanced search in the previous version of the search software. It is highly recommended that you use this search mode, which makes use of the specialized subject headings in CINAHL and Medline. It also allows you to search for specific authors and journals, and for words or phrases in article titles.

Among the new features in this search platform, which is called OvidSP, are:

Sorting Results: A pull-down box sorts results quickly based on available database fields.
Inline Abstracts: Users can expand or collapse citation abstracts for efficient viewing of records in the search results display.
Search Transparency: The Search Aid at the left of your search results shows what was done to retrieve results from a search.
Narrow or Broaden Terms: The Search Aid allows users to narrow their searches by subject, author, or journal.
Author / Journal Suggestions: The Search Aid offers the top author and journal matches based upon the frequency with which each appears in results.
Annotate Results: You can create, view, and edit annotations that appear as electronic "yellow sticky notes" that stay with your results. These annotations only appear when you are logged into your Personal Account in an Ovid database.
Alerts: You can set up Auto Alerts for searches by means of e-mail or RSS delivery.

The last two features require that you have a Personal Account. In order to create your own account, which allows you to save searches and set up alerts, click on the Personal Account link at the top right of the main search page. and follow the instructions.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 9:25 AM | Permalink

UNB Libraries has added a new, free e-resource to the Indexes and Abstracts list.
PILOTS (Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress) will be of interest to
faculty/students interested in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

To access go to:
http://www.lib.unb.ca/eresources/Indexes.php
Drop down the "Browse by Title" menu and select the PILOTS database.

PILOTS Database
The PILOTS bibliographic database, covering the Published International Literature On
Traumatic Stress, is produced at the headquarters of the National Center for
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in White River Junction, Vermont. The PILOTS database is
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Its goal is to include citations
to all literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health
sequelae of traumatic events, without disciplinary, linguistic, or geographical
limitations, and to offer both current and retrospective coverage.

Coverage includes 1871-present.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:37 AM | Permalink

UNB Libraries has arranged a 2-month trial access to CINAHL on the Ebsco platform. It's under the e-Resources menu at the Libraries home page (http://www.lib.unb.ca). Click on Current Trials, then pick it from the list. The Ebsco search software will be familiar to users of PsycInfo, Academic Search Premier, and several other databases. The content is the same as that in the Ovid version of CINAHL in the Indexes and Abstracts list.

In Ebsco's CINAHL the search defaults have been set to allow limits similar to those in the Ovid platform. Also, the "suggest subject terms" check box above the search box is on by default. This is the equivalent of the "map term to subject heading" functionality in Ovid.

We will have access until December 12, so I hope many people will have the opportunity to try it out. Comments and questions are welcome - please direct them to fgiberso@unb.ca

Posted by Frances Giberson at 9:43 AM | Permalink

You may have noticed that Scopus, the new multi-disciplinary article database, had disappeared from the UNB Libraries Indexes and Abstracts list. We lost access to this database during the summer, but it has now been restored. For more information about Scopus, see this article in an earlier edition of UNB Nursing LiBlog.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:27 AM | Permalink

New Brunswick now has a provincial license to the Cochrane Library database through its publisher, Wiley. The license is being funded by a consortium of New Brunswick libraries consisting of UNB Libraries, the New Brunswick Public Library Service, and the 8 regional health authority libraries.

New Brunswick becomes only the third jurisdiction in Canada in which this database is freely available to all. Saskatchewan and the three northern territories (Nunavut, Yukon and NWT) as a group also have provincial licenses. Several countries around the world, including Great Britain, Ireland, all the Scandinavian countries, and Australia, have government-funded national licenses.

The Cochrane database will soon be accessible through the public libraries website to all public library cardholders. The free library card number will be the password for access. The database has been accessible via ip authentication through the RHA libraries and UNB since July, and we will continue to have ip access. At UNB, the Cochrane Library is found under eResources> Indexes and Abstracts at the UNB Libraries website: http://www.lib.unb.ca.

NBPLS is planning a public launch of this new venture in mid-November at the Fredericton Public Library. We will keep you posted as plans progress.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 2:39 PM | Permalink

The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), as well as the e-journal ACP Journal Club, are accessible as part of the EBM Reviews database in the UNB Libraries Indexes and Abstracts list. In order to make them more visible and facilitate their use, we are now listing them separately. The first three are found under their individual database names in the Indexes and Abstracts list, and the ACP Journal Club is now listed in our e-journals.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 4:29 PM | Permalink

The Health Sciences Library at McMaster University has developed two excellent online tutorials about searching CINAHL. They are on the HSL website at http://hsl.mcmaster.ca/education/tutorials/index.htm. The first tutorial, Searching OVID's CINAHL on HSLinks has a bit of McMaster specific information at the beginning about how to get onto the database through the library website, but otherwise it is completely relevant to our system at UNB. The second tutorial, Working with the results of your search on OVID in HSLinks, is more specific to McMaster's system.

These tutorials are narrated, so you can hear the search techniques described while you watch them. Each one is about 10 minutes long.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 9:46 AM | Permalink

ETHX on the Web is a bibliographic database prepared by the Library and Information Services group of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. It is freely available from the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) website at http://www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/databases/index.htm.
The database provides information about over 200,000 "journal articles, book chapters, bills, laws, court decisions, reports, books, audio-visuals, and news articles relating to bioethics and professional ethics", most of which date from 1988 to the present. An FAQ list about the database can be found at http://www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/databases/dbfaqs.htm.
ETHX on the Web has Basic, Advanced, and Boolean search modes. The Advanced mode lets you search by Keyword (or even better, choose terms from the Subject List), combine terms, and limit by date, publication type and so on. An unusual and interesting limit is General Approach, ie Empirical, Legal, Philosophical, Religious, etc. The database, which is updated monthly, has over 3000 items classified under the Subject term "Nursing Ethics".

Posted by Frances Giberson at 4:48 PM | Permalink

There are at least two reasons you might want to find dissertations: 1) to find out whether the research project you have chosen for your graduate work has already been done, and 2) to look up a dissertation to which you have found a reference. You will often find dissertation citations when you are searching CINAHL.

UNB Libraries provides access to the full text of all the PhD dissertations and Master's theses granted by over 1000 universities, mostly in North America, since 1997. This includes over 7300 in Nursing alone. The same "Digital Dissertations" database also provides indexing and abstracting, but not fulltext, for dissertations and theses from 1996 back to 1861. To access the database, go to the UNB Libraries homepage at http://www.lib.unb.ca, go to Indexes and Abstracts from the e-Resources menu at the top of the page, and choose the title "Digital Dissertations (with some fulltext)".

As well as the familiar Keyword, Author, and Title, this database lets you search for dissertations by School, Adviser and Degree. You can combine two or more fields in on search. There is also a searchable Subject field, which classifies theses by academic area. You can use the Browse function to restrict your search to a particular Subject if you wish, or use the Subject Tree to search within several subjects at once. You can also limit your search by date range, consult the School Index, and combine earlier searches using the Search History screen.

Recently, a number of dissertations, but not Master's theses, have been added to the ProQuest Nursing journal collection. For subject searching, Digital Dissertations is better because it is more comprehensive. On the other hand, there is full text available back to 1990, so if you have a citation to a Nursing dissertation between 1990 and 1997, it is worth checking there for it. To get to the ProQuest journal collection, go to the UNB Libraries home page, click on e-Journals in the e-Resources menu, and choose ProQuest Nursing from the "Browse e-Journal Collections" list. Then choose "ProQuest Nursing Search" at the next page. You can then search by keyword, author, title etc. Dissertation results will appear under a separate Dissertations tab. If full text is available, it can be downloaded immediately from the site.

Another place to look for full-text theses is Library and Archives Canada's Theses Canada Portal, which allows you to "access and search for free the full text electronic versions of Canadian theses and dissertations that were published from the beginning of 1998 to August 31, 2002". The portal is free on the Internet at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/thesescanada/index-e.html.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 1:35 PM | Permalink

UNB Libraries has added a new database called Scopus, which you can use to find articles in peer reviewed scientific, medical and technical journals. There is some coverage in the social sciences also. Scopus is quite easy to use, and you may find it a useful supplement to specialized databases such as CINAHL, PSYCInfo, Medline etc.,
particularly if you are looking for information on a topic that crosses disciplinary lines. As in our other databases, the LinkSource link resolver has been enabled, so you should be able to link directly to articles in e-journals to which UNB subscribes. To use Scopus, go to the UNB Libraries website at http://www.lib.unb.ca and choose Scopus from the Indexes and Abstracts list under the e-Resources dropdown menu at the top of the page.

When searching Scopus, you should keep in mind that it has certain limitations:
• Unlike CINAHL and most of our other specialized databases, coverage only goes back to the mid-90s.
• Scopus does not claim to cover any field of study in a comprehensive way. It is essentially a way of getting access to information about articles published in a number of large electronic journal collections.
• Scopus does not use any standardized search terms. Therefore you must use keyword searching, and try to think of all the possible synonyms to the terms you are searching. For example, if you were looking for articles about Pet Therapy and you entered “pet therapy” in the search box you would retrieve 84 items. A search using the synonym “animal assisted therapy” yields 85. Combining the two terms using “or” retrieves a total of 162 items, which indicates that most writers use one term or the other but not both. In CINAHL, on the other hand, either term entered into the search box would automatically map to the preferred term Pet Therapy, and you could retrieve all the references on that subject with one search.

A valuable additional component of Scopus is Scirus, an award-winning Web search engine that provides a single point of access to the scientific Web -- over 160 million pages and documents from websites relevant to research and education, including university sites, author homepages, digital libraries and archives, institutional repositories, preprint servers, and patents.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:13 AM | Permalink

The HealthStar database has been added to the list of Indexes and Abstracts available under the e-Resources menu at the UNB Libraries website (http://www.lib.unb.ca). HealthStar is a subset of the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Medline database. It contains citations to the published literature on health services, technology, administration, and research. HealthStar focuses on both the clinical and non-clinical aspects of health care delivery. The following topics are included: evaluation of patient outcomes; effectiveness of procedures, programs, products, services and processes; administration and planning of health facilities, services and manpower; health insurance; health policy; health services research; health economics and financial management; laws and regulation; personnel administration; quality assurance; licensure; and accreditation.

HealthStar is provided by Ovid, the same source from which we access CINAHL, Medline, EBM Reviews, and Health and Psychosocial Instruments. Because HealthStar citations are derived from Medline, it uses MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings. Subject mapping, which is on by default, tries to map your search terms to an appropriate MeSH term. For example, the term "emergency departments" entered in the search box brings up a list of suggested terms, which include "Emergency Service, Hospital", "Emergency Nursing" and "Triage". It is also possible to search by keyword if none of the suggested terms seems suitable.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:04 AM | Permalink