New version of the PubMed Tutorial available

The National Library of Medicine is pleased to release a new version of the PubMed Tutorial. As always, the tutorial is available from the PubMed sidebar.

This new version incorporates changes to PubMed through February 2005 including the My NCBI feature.

New Ovid Features

I hope you've noticed that Ovid has spruced up its interface - it happened the second week of July!

The main menu screen has a clean updated look and some of the menu choices have been placed in different locations on the screen.

This is always hard for anyone who was so used to the old interface that you barely had to look at the screen and still could click on the correct button.

Several new features have been added to this newly spruced up interface:

Find A Citation
Find Similar
Find Citing Articles

Find a Citation is a great addition to the Ovid interface and works much the same as PubMed's Citation Matcher. It allows you to plug known information about an article into a form - and you can plug as few as one or two items. The system will return every article in the database that matches that data -- a great way to attempt the location of an article based on what little you might remember about that article. It is also useful when trying to pull up a citation quickly.

Now, this is my opinion and it's really for those folks at Yale who are using this interface to search MEDLINE and other databases, but I think that the other two features should be used with caution.

Find Citing Articles looks for citing articles in Journals@Ovid only. And while there are many journals in Journals@Ovid, it is not an accurate picture of who is really citing the article. There are other resources (Web of Science, Scopus) available that will simply do a better job for you.

Finding Similar is using an alogorithm based on words in the title to find similar articles. Every time that I've tried this, it's been disappointing. I usually get one or two 'similar' articles but I know there's more.

So, enjoy the new look and Find a Citation but be cautious with Find Citing Articles and Find Similar.

Database Highlight: Global Health and Global Health Archive

Global Health brings together the resources of two internationally renowned databases - the Public Health and Tropical Medicine (PHTM) database, previously produced by the Bureau of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases (BHTD), and the human health and diseases information extracted from CAB ABSTRACTS.

Dating back to 1973, together they provide a unique resource which offers a substantially deeper subject coverage of information related to human health and communicable diseases than many other sources currently available.

Global Health provides an alternative, complementary point of reference with a broad analysis of foreign language journals, books, research reports, patents and standards, dissertations, conference proceedings, annual reports, public health, developing country information, and other difficult to obtain material.

The Global Health database covers the following aspects of human health and disease:

• communicable diseases (including HIV/AIDS)
• tropical diseases, i.e, diseases in the tropics (including field and experimental studies)
• parasitic diseases and parasitology - medical entomology
• human nutrition (including food composition, food poisoning, effects of diet on health, nutritional disorders, and experimental aspects)
• community and public health (including chronic diseases, occupational health, health status indicators, the impact of agriculture on health, and cancer epidemiology)
• medicinal and poisonous plants (including pharmacology, tissue culture, animal studies, plant composition, allergens, and toxins)

Over 16,000 serial sources from more than 130 countries are scanned regularly for inclusion in the Global Health database, to produce approximately 25,000 new entries per year. Nearly all records have informative English abstracts prepared by scientists and linguists.

Global Health Archive is a "unique electronic map of humankind's global scientific heritage."

800,000 records from 1910 to 1973, equivalent to 300 volumes of research, provide a unique resource which offers a substantially deeper subject coverage of information related to human health and communicable diseases than many other sources currently available.

Global Health Archive is presented as a searchable modern database fully compatible with other databases, indexed by our subject specialists, placing obsolete terms in their modern context.

The Global Health Archive database covers the following aspects of human health and disease:

• public health
• tropical and communicable diseases
• nutrition
• helminthology
• entomology
• mycology

For More Information:
Click on Major Resources from the Library's home page. Part of the Ovid family of databases.
Ovid Field Guide
Serials Cited

New Version of TOXMAP Available

A new version of TOXMAP was released July 25, 2005.

TOXMAP 2.4 contains the following new features:

• 2003 Toxics Release Inventory Data (TRI)
• Chemical Spell Checker: Chemical names are often hard to spell; TOXMAP now locates 'near matches'
• TRI chemical list page, with links to National Library of Medicine chemical information resources
• Updated and expanded FAQs

TOXMAP is an interactive web site from the National Library of Medicine that shows the amount and location of reported toxic chemicals released into the environment on maps of the United States. TOXMAP allows users to visually explore information about releases of toxic chemicals by industrial facilities around the United States as reported annually to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It also integrates the map display with access to relevant bibliographic references and other data on these chemicals, providing a map-based portal to these resources.

[From the NLM Technical Bulletin]