Study while you wait: NCSBN’s Medication Flashcards Mobile App

Make the most of your time while standing in line or waiting for an appointment… study! The National Council of the State Boards of NursingNCSBN Learning Extension Medication Flashcards has a free app that will help you study drug information in preparation for the NCLEX exam or a pharmacology exam. The app is only available for the iphone and ipad at this time, but an Android version is due for release next month (April 2015).

Benzo flashcard with circle

The app uses a flashcard format. Medications are grouped into categories (eg. anti-psychotics, beta blockers, lipid-lowering agents, etc.) or they can be searched by specific drug.

Tap the screen to flip the card. The back of the flashcard contains:

  • generic and brand names of drugs that fall into that category
  • drug uses along with an overview of the mechanism of action
  • information that is “nice to know” (eg. do not discontinue the medication suddenly), “good to know” (eg. exposure to sunlight may cause a severe sunburn), and “really important to know” (eg. may cause confusion and hallucinations and should be avoided in clients over 70).

There is an option to “Flag” what you don’t know or indicate that you “Got it” with the drugs that you are comfortable with. You can then come back and focus on the flagged medications.

Most of us have our smartphones with us most all the time. So as a study aid, NCSBN’s Flashcards are conveniently at hand. Plus, the price is right!

Jill Turner, Librarian

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

german docOccasionally one of your professors may ask you to write a paper citing primary sources. A primary source is a document, recording or physical object that conveys a first-hand account or direct evidence of an event or time period. Primary sources also include publications (often journal articles) which report results of or data from original research. (Note: digital, microform or published copies of original materials can still be considered primary sources as long as their content is unchanged)

Primary sources can include:

  • Diaries, interviews, memoirs, oral histories, and letters from first-hand observers
  • Video and sound recordings and photographs
  • Government documents such as birth or marriage certificates, census records, and trial transcripts
  • Maps
  • Physical artifacts such as medals, clothing,and tapestries
  • Survey research such as market surveys or opinion polls
  • Journal articles revealing the results of original research

Secondary sources are produced after an event occurs by someone who was not present during the event. They often cite primary sources and attempt to interpret, evaluate or analyze original sources.

Examples of Secondary sources include:

  • History textbooks
  • Encyclopedias
  • Commentaries, criticisms and analyses
  • Biographies and bibliographies

To find primary sources in the library catalog, do a keyword search for your topic and add one of the following words:

  • Diary
  • Memoir
  • Autobiography
  • Correspondence
  • Personal narrative
  • Speech
  • Oral history
  • Interview
  • Manuscript
  • Ask one of the friendly librarians if you need additional help.

    Jill Spreitzer, Librarian

Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are

healthcare marketingUsing the UDM Library catalog can be a frustrating experience when it works too well and retrieves thousands of matches for your search. That’s why there are so many different tools and tricks for refining your search, and why librarians are experts at focusing your search to retrieve a manageable list of results.

But the reverse problem often occurs as well. You know darn well that book is in the catalog somewhere. You found it before. Where is it now?

Leaving aside the remote possibilities that the book has been withdrawn from the collection, there are a number of other things that can go wrong. Ironically, these often happen out of good motives.

For example, limiting the scope of your search is generally helpful. But let’s say you generally spend your free time at the McNichols Campus Library (and who doesn’t?), and have gotten used to always limiting your searches to materials held there. By doing so, you are automatically excluding all electronic books from your search results, since the catalog does not recognize them as part of the McNichols collection. Search limits should be treated like antibiotics and used if they are necessary, not just because they are there.

Misspellings are an obvious cause of empty search results, and there are constant reminders to check your spelling, usually in the voice of your first grade teacher. But sometimes just plain spelling gets you in trouble.

Here’s a very simple title to find. I assure you it’s in the catalog. Go to it:

Healthcare marketing plans

If you try a keyword search, there are just six results. Very good, except that none match.

Now, I’m sure about half of you are totally frustrated. The other half entered the title as Health Care Marketing Plans, found the book with no trouble and are halfway through it.

Yes, it makes a difference whether you enter “health care” or “healthcare”. Or pairs like “labor / labour”, “color / colour”, “counselling / counseling”, and so on. The computer is unfailingly literal, and the exact word or phrase must appear in the catalog entry before it winds up in your search results.

The bad news is that you have to remember this stuff. The good news is that you don’t have to do two searches every time you’re looking for a health care / healthcare topic. The Power search option is made for this problem, since part of the search can link the two variant forms with an “OR”, ensuring either will be retrieved.

Yes, at times searching the catalog is like being “IT” in a never-ending game of Hide-and-Go-Seek. But if the material is there, you can find it with a little thought, a little luck, and a helpful librarian.

 

David Moody, Librarian

Searching DOIs in Google, Bing or Other Search Engines

Last week’s Librarian blog was about finding a journal article by searching its DOI using the Library’s journal finder.  But you can also use a search engine, such as Google or Bing, to find an article by its DOI.

As discussed in last week’s blog, a DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a unique number given to an article to provide a persistent link to its location on the internet. The DOI is typically located on the first page of an article.

You may search the DOI in Google, Bing or another search engine.

For example, type DOI: 10.3102/003465430298571 in Google.Google DOI

The tricky part comes when you must guess which database UDM is likely to subscribe to. Clicking the first reference…

Google DOI#2

takes you to the homepage of the Sage journal: Review of Educational Research.(Note “sagepub” in the URL.) Once there you will find the full text free!

Google DOI#3

Remember: not all articles have a DOI and not all databases allow DOI searching.

New DOI Search Feature

Have you ever seen a DOI on an article and wondered what it was? DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a unique number given to an article to provide a persistent link to its location on the internet. The DOI is typically located on the first page of an article.

A new feature of the Full Text Journal Finder tool allows you to search using the article’s DOI.

Go to research.udmercy.edu, click Articles, Journals + Databases, scroll down to “Find online journals by title,” click SEARCH.

Type the DOI numbers (do not type DOI) in the third search box.  For example:

DOI

 

Click Search.

You are now taken to the homepage of the journal: Review of Educational Research. As long as UDM subscribes to the journal, you will find the full text free!

DOI This Article

 

Always select the PDF as it is a photocopy of the article.  You will obtain all the charts, graphs, or photos in the paper as well as the original pagination.

However, be advised that not all articles have a DOI and not all databases allow DOI searching.

IEEE Xplore Digital Library

Need to find information in electrical and computer engineering? Even information on medical or dental applications? Try IEEE Xplore. This database offers basic and advanced searching in almost four million records, including conference publications, standards, journals, and magazines published by the IEEE. Only abstracts are available.
Topics include:
Aerospace
Bioengineering
Communication, Networking, and Broadcasting
Components, Circuits, Devices, and Systems
Engineering Materials
Engineering Profession
Fields, Waves, & Electromagnetics
General Topics for Engineers
Geoscience
Nuclear Engineering
Photonics & Electo Optics
Power Energy & Industrial Applications
Robots and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation

Go to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp

Don’t Stress Over Citations!

Drummer Boy MilitaryI hope by now that it’s been drummed into your heads, the need to properly document where, and how you found the information that you’re using within your papers. If it’s not common knowledge, and is not of your own creation; i.e. the words and ideas are those of another person, or organization, then you need to give proper credit. Citing where those words and ideas originally came from, where they were published, what journal, magazine, or website, can often seem like a daunting task. But, rest assured, the staff of the library are here to help.

If you’re getting into some deep research, or maybe you just want a powerful tool that can help keep track of your sources and create entire bibliographies, then check out RefWorks. RefWorks is a web-based database and bibliography creator. RefWorks users can import references from online databases and use these references in writing their papers and automatically format the bibliography and paper in seconds. When signing up for your individual account, you will need to use your UDM email address and the following group code: RWUDetroitMer. It might be worth your time to check out some of the available tutorials.

You might be thinking to yourself, “That’s great! But, I don’t really need all that.” So…maybe you just want something that can help generate correct citations in the format of your choice. Then try out one of these:

Lastly, you can Ask A Librarian. But please, please don’t consider your friendly librarian the last resort! Librarians can be invaluable in helping you find resources, and in helping you document those sources. Good luck and hope to see you at the reference desk.

FROM THE RESEARCH DESK: InfoTrac Newsstand

newsstandHard to believe, but there once was a time when you could visit the corner newspaper stand and find daily (sometimes twice daily) newspapers from the immediate vicinity as well as national and even international publications providing different perspectives on important events and people. Well, the good ‘ole days aren’t completely gone thanks to the MeL Database  InfoTrac Newsstand.

InfoTrac Newsstand provides access to full-text newspapers and allows users to search articles by title, headline, date and other fields. Over 1,100 publications in various formats and languages are included with coverage variously ranging from 1980 to the present. Search results can be narrowed by publication title, date, section (Business, Opinion and Editorial, Lifestyle, etc.), even Lexile Score, and more. Investor’s Business Daily, The Guardian, Michigan Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Star, and
USA Today are some of the titles included.

Helpful tools will allow you to generate citations for articles in multiple formats (e.g. MLA, APA), listen to articles, and translate articles into different languages. If your searches are getting too many results, the convenient Topic Finder tool will help you focus your search.  topic finder

InfoTrac Newsstand is a one-stop source for current news and searchable archived news. Keep InfoTrac Newsstand in mind the next time you  are looking for the world view as covered in the press.

 

 

 

 

 

Some text used with permission from Eunice Borelli and Deb Biggs Thomas, Michigan eLibrary, Library of Michigan.

Finding health statistics

chart image
Looking for health related stats can be a daunting task. There’s so much info out there, how do you find the right fact?

 

CDC logoThe good news is lots of reliable info is freely available through various federal government sites.  Many have tutorials to help with use of the data.

 

A good place to start is the National Center for Health Statistics site maintained by the CDC [Center for  Disease Control].

You can find birth, death, marriage and death stats at National Vital Statistics Reports  When the President mentioned in the recent State of the Union address that teen pregnancy is declining, this is where that info likely came from.

 

Check out the MMWR – Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report  for data on   influenza activity throughout the United States. An explanation of reportable diseases can be found here as well.

Another useful undertaking of the CDC/NCHS is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey or NHNES.   This is an ongoing program of studies to access the health of adults and children.  Use of dietary supplements, nut consumption among adults — it’s all here.

 Health Data Interactive  provides downloadable tables of data on infants, children, adolescents, adults, and older adults. Tables can be customized by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic location to explore different trends and patterns. [from the website]

If you like reading the dictionary — wait, doesn’t everyone? — it’s easy to get lost following all the information available.  Remember if you need any help finding or using this data see a librarian.

Great Reads – from Business

NancyLast week, librarian Nancy Chesik retired after 24 years at UDM. Nancy has worked with the College of Business for most of her time here and has been prodigious in preparing quality instructional materials. She has been a source of creative ideas in her assigned areas and in marketing the libraries. Her creativity will be missed. We wish her well in her retirement. As a tribute to Nancy, we are reprising her last blog entry from October 2014.

 

 

In the 1967 movie The Graduate Mr. McGuire says to the Dustin Hoffman’s character, a recent college graduate, “I want to say one word Benjamin, just one word … It’s plastics”.  Today, he might well have said “Two words Benjamin,  business information.”  Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg, a private company that specialized in data, media, software analytics, and stock trading platforms (terminals) sells information, data.  Bloomberg’s billions are built on information, business information.

Bloomberg supplies business, financial and economic news.  It’s comes as no surprise that they collect data on global stocks, currency, companies, but what may be a little surprising is they also supply data on sports: baseball, soccer, etc.  Bloomberg collects data on baseball.  24 of the 27  major league teams subscribe to the data.  Baseball managers use the data: the data will tell you of sportsanalyticswhich four pitches Justin Verlander throws: fastball, curveball, change up, or slider he most likely to throw as a first pitch against a given player.  Like stock traders and hedge funds managers that use data to improve the odds in the market, baseball managers use the data to improve the odds of winning games.

Not long ago sixty minutes did a profile of a MBA student from Notre Dame University, who successfully gambles in the fantasy baseball leagues using algorithms he developed with sports data.

This fall you will see a number of books added to our collection on sabermetrics: this is the term for the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.

Some of the most interesting reading comes directly from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  There are many recognizable plots in thrillers that seem if they are scooped directly from the WSJ.  Some business books can read like thrillers, and some are just plain fascinating.

The Quants: Scott Patterson.  In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent Nequantsw York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.   Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the past twenty years, this species of  math whiz had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk takers who’d long been the alpha males of the world’s largest casino. The quants believed that a cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized that night, though, that in creating this extraordinary system, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein had sown the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.

 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg.  The vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the  root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential. Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune ‘s list of the 50  Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time ‘s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TED Talk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves  back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been  viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.  In Lean In, Sandberg digs deeper into these leaninissues, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to cut through the layers of ambiguity and bias surrounding the lives and choices of working women. She recounts her own decisions, mistakes, and daily struggles to make the right choices for herself, her career, and her family. She  provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career, urging women to set boundaries and to abandon the myth of “having it all.” She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women in the workplace and at home. Written with both humor and wisdom, Sandberg’sflashboys book is an inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth. Lean In is destined to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis, Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post-financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading–source of the most intractable problems–will have no advantage whatsoever.The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.

 

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