Author: Jason Curtis

Keep informed of the latest research with 'Read by QxMD'

Posted on by

If you're looking for an easy way to see the latest articles in your favourite journals or on keywords of interest, Read by QxMD can help.

It's an app and website that tracks articles in healthcare journals and alerts you to new ones matching your interests. More than that, it can make finding the full-text easy as it links to our journal holdings, or locates open access copies. The app version can store your NHS OpenAthens account details - no more logging into OpenAthens each time you want to access an article!

It's free to create a Read by QxMD account, and you can link your account to the journal holdings of Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, Staffordshire University or Keele University.

You can also add papers to your own virtual collections, recommend papers, and discuss articles.

An alternative to Read by QxMD is our KnowledgeShare service that can now offer tables of contents by email.

Equality and diversity e-book collection

Posted on by

You now have easy access to 23 additional e-books covering topics in equality and diversity. These can all be accessed with an NHS OpenAthens account from anywhere, and are all on the Kortext platform. For more information about using the Kortext e-books and the Kortext mobile app, visit our guide.

Follow the links below to open the books:

Access more information at any time with our new collection of e-books

Posted on by

Access to information anywhere, anytime, is even easier with our growing collection of e-books. We now have a new collection of 138 titles via Kortext, and these include a number of titles in the 'at a glance' series as well as many other titles covering medicine, nursing, allied health and midwifery.

All of them can be found via OmniSearch using the 'Books' tab (where you can also search all of our other books and e-books) or you can access the Kortext collection directly (click 'Collections' after logging in to see the whole range of books available). Access is via an NHS OpenAthens account.

Titles include...

...plus another 131 titles!

You can create a personal account to make it easier to login in future (and to enable you to use the mobile app). Visit the Kortext website, select your institution and login as normal with your NHS OpenAthens account. Logout by using the three dots at the top right of the screen and selecting 'Sign Out'. When the login screen appears again, select 'Forgotten Password?'. Use the email address linked to your OpenAthens account to get a password reset link.

Once you've reset your password, you can login to the website and mobile apps with your email and chosen password.

Make Time to Talk – support your own and other people’s mental health

Posted on by

Thursday, 4th February is #TimeToTalk day to support mental health, and we're supporting it by organising a Randomised Coffee Trial during February.

Sign up to the Randomised Coffee Trial using the form below and we'll randomly* match you up with someone else. You can then arrange a good time to have a chat with them. This could be over the phone, over Microsoft Teams, or perhaps arrange to go for a walk outside. The suggested time is half an hour, but even a small conversation can make a big difference.

It's a good way to promote your own mental wellbeing, talk about how you’re feeling, and feel more connected, but they can also help to give you a better idea of what goes on in other teams and what their challenges are, meet new people, build relationships, share learning and build community. What you talk about is up to you, and it doesn’t even necessarily need to be work-related.

Grab a hot drink and get talking! (biscuits or cake optional, but highly recommended).

You can either use the form, or simply contact Jason Curtis in the Shrewsbury Health Library (01743 492511 or extension 2511) with your details.

* May not be entirely random, as we’ll try to make sure your coffee partner is from a different team

Registration form

Your name

Your job title

Department or Ward

Site

Email Address

Telephone Number

Additional information

Your information
We'll use the information provided by you to register you for the Randomised Coffee Trial, and to let the person you're matched with know how to contact you. For more information about how your information is used, visit our privacy policy.

 

 

6 ways OmniSearch makes searching easier

Posted on by

Our OmniSearch facility has undergone a few changes recently, and is now even more powerful. Here are 6 reasons why.

1. You can now search books and e-books at the same time

2. You can even search books, e-books and articles at the same time!

3. Books, e-books and articles are now searched using WorldCat Discovery, offering you new features such as book covers, citation tools, and easy filtering of results

4. The Article search finds articles in Medline, PsycARTICLES, ERIC, PubMed Central and the Cochrane Library so you don't have to search individual databases

5. The Evidence tab allows you to search Trip Database for various types of evidence (such as guidelines, systematic reviews or evidence summaries), the Cochrane Library (for systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials), BMJ Best Practice (for summaries of evidence) or the BNF/BNFc (for prescribing information)

6. Searches are carried from one search tab to the next so you can repeat the search in different resources quickly

For more information, visit our new OmniSearch guide.

Keep up to date with the latest COVID-19 evidence

Posted on by

We've just published the latest edition of our COVID-19 Evidence Bulletin, detailing the latest evidence, guidance and other resources to support the response to the pandemic.

This issue includes guidance from NICE on 'long COVID', and resources to support vaccinations.

The libraries are remaining open during the lockdown and there is no need to book ahead – you can drop-in, browse the shelves, use the IT and study individually. If you need to access the libraries when we are unstaffed, you may wish to arrange 24/7 access.

We have put measures in place to keep you and our staff safe – please read and observe these during your visit.

Get the latest tables of contents from your favourite journals

Posted on by

The KnowledgeShare service now offers you the ability to receive tables of contents for a wide range of healthcare journals.

The contents list of your chosen journals will be sent out once a month in a single email (so you won't get lots of separate emails). You can up by using the Evidence Updates form.

Any journal that is indexed in PubMed can be added to the tables of contents service, but unfortunately not all journals will be available if they are not included in PubMed.

It's an easy way to receive the latest contents from healthcare journals, but we also offer access to the Read by QxMD app as well, where you can also get details of the latest articles by following your favourite journals, keywords or collections.

Librarians give health professionals the 'gift of time'

Posted on by

We know that all healthcare professionals are short of time - time to be confident you have the most relevant, evidence-based information you need.

A recent report to an All-Party Parliamentary Group commissioned by HEE, Library and Knowledge Services Value Proposition: The Gift of Time, clearly outlines the true value of NHS Library and Knowledge Services having both a direct and indirect effect on the care patients receive. They make a positive impact on services as a whole, providing an economic value of millions of pounds to the NHS.

Health librarians and knowledge specialists make the gathering of information as easy as possible for you, relieving the burden of sourcing and synthesising evidence while enabling NHS organisations to meet their statutory obligations to get evidence into practice across the service.

Findings in a recently published international literature review suggest a return of £2.40 for every £1 spend on NHS library and knowledge services.

Patrick Mitchell, Director of Innovation and Transformation, Health Education England, said:

"This report gives us some truly great insight into the value that embedded NHS Library and Knowledge Services bring to staff at all levels of  the healthcare system when planning and delivering care for local people."

What is medRxiv?

Posted on by

medRxiv (pronounced med-archive) is one of a growing number of preprint servers where articles can be freely shared prior to peer-review and acceptance by a journal. It is jointly owned by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Yale University and BMJ, and was launched in 2019.

medRxiv covers medical, clinical, and related health sciences and accepts research articles (including systematic reviews and meta-analyses). It doesn't accept material such as narrative reviews or opinion pieces. 

Because the material submitted to medRxiv is unpublished, it's not indexed in databases such as PubMed until the article is later peer-reviewed and published in a journal. Preprints in medRxiv can however be found in Google and Google Scholar very quickly after submission.

When it comes to fast-moving topics such as COVID-19, preprint servers can make new research available very quickly, and reduce research waste from duplicated efforts and non-reporting. However, they can also add to the spread of poor-quality or misleading research due to the lack of peer-review, and should be used with care.

As medRxiv makes clear on each article's detail page:

'This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.'

medRxiv does do some screening checks on submitted articles, such as checking they are research-based, and checking for plagiarism and defamation. A researcher in a relevant field will check the basic content and organisation of the article, but medRxiv does not review a manuscript’s methods, assumptions, conclusions, or scientific quality.

If you intend to publish a research article, note that some journal publishers may not accept articles that have already been made available on a preprint server, so it's worth checking the policies of any journals you intend to submit the article to.

Further reading

Make the most of Twitter by using Tweetdeck

Posted on by

Tweetdeck is a free desktop tool provided by Twitter that can make using Twitter easier and more effective. Tweetdeck allows you to see multiple columns on one screen (so no more switching views) and also allows you to manage multiple accounts which can really help if you manage a departmental account as well as your own.

There is no need to create a separate login, and you simply use your Twitter login details.

Columns in Tweetdeck can consist of your timeline, saved searches, Tweets from list of people on a topic, notifications, your 'liked' Tweets and more.