The Himmelfarb Library’s Scholarly Communications Committee is pleased to present a series of short lectures that will answer common questions researchers may have! Running for 3-5 minutes, each video will address a specific topic ranging from predatory journals to preprints to changing citation styles and so much more. Below are the titles and brief descriptions for the first round of lectures:
Setting Up Your Google Scholar Profile: Taking control of your online researcher profiles is a great way to put your best foot forward online. One of the most important of those profiles is your Google Scholar author profile and in this video, I'll show you how to claim that profile and make sure it's accurate and complete.
From AMA to APA: Quickly Changing Citation Styles: Reformat the references in your manuscript for submission to a journal in just 5 minutes by using RefWorks Write-N-Cite for Word!
Tracking Citations with Scopus: Following article citations in Scopus can help you identify highly influential articles in a field as well as articles that you may have missed using traditional keyword searching. To that end, in this video we’ll briefly explore Scopus's unique citation tracking features.
The Researcher Audit Profile Service at the Himmelfarb Library: ORCiD. Scopus Author Profile. Publons. Google Scholar Profile.. Keeping up with your author profile in numerous systems can be a daunting task. In this brief video, you will learn about the Researcher Profile Audit Service designed to help researchers at GW maximize their use of these systems. An audit of your researcher profiles in prominent systems can help to differentiate you from other researchers, allow you to quickly demonstrate your impact for professional advancement, and help you to build a professional network.
The Clarivate Manuscript Matcher: The Clarivate Manuscript Matcher is a text prediction tool that can used by authors to identify potential journals to approach about publishing your manuscript. This short video introduction covers the essentials of how to register for an account and how to use the Clarivate Manuscript Matcher.
Preprint Servers: Balancing the Pros & Cons: Do you want to learn more about preprints and how they can help you share your research with others? Are you curious about how preprints differ from published scholarly articles? Then watch ‘Preprint Servers: Balancing the Pros and Cons,” a video from Himmelfarb Library’s Scholarly Communications Committee! In this video, we’ll briefly discuss what preprints are, some benefits of the preprint model and some challenges that may impact scholars and researchers.
How to Spot a Predatory Journal: Learn how to spot a predatory journal quickly and easily! This video focuses on the top five things to look for when identifying predatory journals.
MATLAB is now available in Himmelfarb Library’sBloedorn Technology Center and Middle Lab, and can also be installed on your personal computer! Does your research involve analyzing large-scale datasets with multiple variants and dimensions? Do you teach data analysis? If you answered yes to either of these questions, MATLAB could be for you.
MATLAB is a programming platform designed for engineers and scientists. MATLAB language is a matrix-based language that allows for natural expression of computational mathematics. MATLAB is typically used for math and computation, developing algorithms, modeling, simulation, prototyping, data analysis, exploration, visualization, and scientific graphics.
MATLAB is available on the following workstations (map) on Himmelfarb’s third floor:
In an effort to remain accountable to communities who have been negatively impacted by past and present medical injustices, the staff at Himmelfarb Library is committed to the work of maintaining an anti-discriminatory practice. We will uplift and highlight diverse stories throughout the year, and not shy away from difficult conversations necessary for health sciences education. To help fulfill this mission, this week’s blog post will feature a conversation with Dr. Raymond Pla, MD.
Dr. Raymond Pla
Dr. Raymond Pla is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at GW. He received his BS from Emory, then went on to Meharry Medical School, one of four HBCU medical schools, for his MD. I was honored to speak with Dr. Pla about his path to the health sciences, the work he does as a Professor at GW, and his people-first approach to advocacy, particularly when speaking with communities of color.
Dr. Pla did not always intend to go into medicine, he “had the same dreams that you commonly encounter when you're talking to young boys.” Even when he first started his BS program in Biology at Emory, he did not intend to go into medicine, though it was an option. The summer after his Junior year, however, that changed. Over the summer, he had the opportunity to shadow Dr. Clive Callendar at Howard University, going on rounds, in the ICU, and even observing in the OR. A titan in the field of transplantation, especially kidney and liver, Dr. Callendar’s high expectations of his residents, interns, and even the young Dr. Pla set a high standard for medical education. What most fascinated Dr. Pla during his time in the OR was “that person up at the head of the table, on the other side of what we call the ether screen… the anesthesiologist.” Eventually, Dr. Pla started observing with the anesthesiologist, learning what their role was in transplant surgery. Seeing the patients the next day, looking at their labs and seeing the changes in their clinical course overnight, was the second most impactful part of the experience. When Dr. Pla started at Meharry, his classmates reported he already had every intention of going into anesthesiology.
The impact Dr. Callendar had on Dr. Pla is evident, as is Dr. Pla’s desire to pay that influence forward in his practice and teaching. He described what he considers the two most important things doctors, especially those in academic medicine, do. First, “we care.” It is not just about an accurate diagnosis or a successful course of treatment. The foundation of those things is caring - thinking about a patient’s condition in the shower or on a jog or sitting in traffic, jotting down a realization and following up on it the next day, revising the patient’s treatment plan based on these considerations and reflections. And sticking with patients, following them throughout their course of treatment. Dr. Pla described the importance of making time for patients as a part of this, saying “We’ll sit and listen when we don’t have time. When we’re busy, we have someplace else that we need to be. We will redefine where we need to be and where we need to be at this moment is sitting with this person, with their family, to answer questions. Or sit and listen.”
The second of these most important things is “when we give of ourselves to the next generation, the same way that someone gave of themselves.” And he tied giving back into caring, as it is part of caring. Giving can take many forms. Reflecting on your teaching, updating what or how you teach. Dr. Pla recounted a story of a summer he spent at the United States Naval Academy, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering he met there. This Professor received word that a pilot had overshot the carrier deck and put their plane into the ocean. The pilot was not hurt, but this Professor asked himself “Was there something I didn’t teach that young man that had I taught him, had he known, would have prevented what could have been a fatal accident?” Hearing from graduates of the residency program about how something he taught them prevented an injury or a loss of life, particularly in airway management, reinforces that you are teaching those vital things.
When speaking with Dr. Pla it is abundantly evident that teaching is his favorite part of the work he does at GW. He lights up when talking about “The Forgotten Four,” encouraging his students to consider treatments and medications that tend to be overlooked or kept in the back of your mind, and bringing those forward. Because bringing those forward can quite literally save a life. He considers that an “ethical duty, a moral duty.” The themes of moral and ethical duties as medical practitioners echoed throughout our conversation.
Recently, Dr. Pla has made appearances on local news, encouraging the African-American community to get the COVID-19 vaccine. As one of the first people in DC to receive the vaccine, Dr. Pla says he felt an obligation to speak to his community and encourage them to get the vaccine. There is an understandable mistrust of the medical establishment within black and brown communities. Most of us can cite Tuskegee, World War II, Henrietta Lacks, Baltimore. But when we cite these infamous atrocities we overlook the personal atrocities people of color experience on a regular basis. While there is still a great deal of work to be done to rebuild that trust, to eliminate systemic racism within medicine, there is an immediate need to get vaccines to these communities that are being disproportionately affected by the virus. Because when these communities see those who have earned their mistrust saying this vaccine is the only way forward, they “[have] no hope for a better future… a pandemic-free future.” Dr. Pla sees his outreach as a way to help bring hope back to his community, to begin addressing the legacy of racism in medicine, and to hopefully earn back some trust. He hopes to continue this work in a meaningful way, to encourage colleagues and students to do their part as members of the medical community, and to address the other epidemics facing communities of color - infant mortality, maternal mortality, advanced heart disease, breast cancer, etc., all of which disproportionately affect people of color. It is “a moral calling for those of us who value lives.”
There is still so much work to be done. But, as Dr. Pla argues, just because this is a daunting task does not mean we should dismiss it. It does not mean we should despair, or give up hope. During our conversation he invoked a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It is a quote often invoked to remind us that the work we do today is but part of the work necessary. That the immediate is but a small part of the whole. Quite often allies, including myself at times, use this quote as an excuse to not take action when we are most needed. With Dr. Pla’s invocation, those of us who consider ourselves allies in the medical community should answer the call not to conversation, but to action. We must take steps to ensure communities of color are treated with dignity and receive a level of medical care that keeps them healthy, honoring their community-based needs and concerns.
Have you taken advantage of our Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service? If you are unfamiliar with ILL, it is a service that allows you to request articles and books that are not currently a part of the current Himmelfarb collection. If you are interested in learning more about our Interlibrary, or “ILL” service, feel free to check out our ILL guide. Our guide also provides answers to questions such as “How long will my request take?” Or “How much does a rush request cost?”
GW SMHS, SON, and SPH faculty, students, residents and staff are entitled to 15 free requests through the period of January to the end of June. Starting July 1st, the number resets and our SMHS, SON, and SPH users are able to request another 15 through the period of June to the end of December. The limit will reset again on January 1st.
Any requests past the allocated 15 will incur a $10 charge. Users will be notified of this before their request is submitted and we will not proceed until the user agrees to pay for the additional request/s.
As always, if you have any questions you can contact our ILL department at mlbdoc@gwu.edu. We are more than happy to answer any and all inquiries you may have!
Himmelfarb Library's building will be closed on Thursday, February 18, 2021. Online access will remain available 24/7 and library staff will be available to assist during regular hours. Ask a librarian!
In an effort to remain accountable to communities who have been negatively impacted by past and present medical injustices, the staff at Himmelfarb Library is committed to the work of maintaining an anti-discriminatory practice. We will uplift and highlight diverse stories throughout the year, and not shy away from difficult conversations necessary for health sciences education. To help fulfill this mission, this week’s blog post will cover Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS was recently appointed to chair the U.S. COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. Dr. Nunez had been previously appointed as co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition team’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. The executive order appointing Dr. Nunez-Smith to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force identifies the issue that while people of color in the United States are more likely to become sick and die of COVID-19, but incomplete data on underlying health conditions, social factors, and rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality have hampered an equitable response.
Dr. Nunez-Smith grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and pursued her education at Swarthmore College, Jefferson Medical College, and Yale University. Her understanding of the effects of limited access to health care date to her childhood when her father had a stroke in his 40s as a result of untreated hypertension. The stroke left her father partially paralyzed and Dr. Nunez Smith described the experience in a New York Times profile:
"He was a champion and a fighter. But my memories are of a father who had to live life with this daily reminder of how we had failed in terms of our health care. I don’t want another little girl out there to have her father suffer a stroke that is debilitating and life-altering in that way."
Dr. Nunez-Smith is responsible for an extensive bibliography of research on health promotion and health equity as well as research methods including primary data collection, data management and analysis, qualitative and mixed methods research, and population health. While Dr. Nunez-Smith will remain in her position as Associate Dean for Health Equity Research at Yale University and a board-certified internal medicine physician, it's her work on the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force that is getting much attention.
Dr. Nunez Smith has identified some primary goals of the task force including addressing vaccination as well as equitable access to other healthcare services including testing, contact tracing, and treatment. In a Fortune magazine profile, Dr. Nunez-Smith discussed COVID-19 vaccination in communities of color which are historically underserved:
"It's important for us to acknowledge why there’s this hesitancy. People are going to be skeptical of vaccines, particularly many in communities where there is a not-long-ago history of experimentation, and where there are daily, contemporary reminders of differential status and access. But not every person or group that's skeptical of vaccines has their skepticism rooted in the same things, not even for every person of color who's skeptical. So we need to be thinking about targeted messaging; different people have different questions and motivations, and our response is not one-size-fits-all in terms of the information people need."
Are you working on a research project with a data component? Unsure what you need to do to meet data management requirements? Himmelfarb Library’s new Data Management Research Guide can help! Tom Harrod, our Research Support Librarian, has compiled a guide full of answers and resources.
Covering the major components of the data lifecycle, the Data Management Research Guide features information on: data-related funding requirements from the NIH and NSF; data management plan resources and examples; documentation and metadata requirements; a discussion of storage and security concerns; information on sharing your data; and resources to help identify appropriate data repositories for your research.
If you have further questions about data management and the data lifecycle, you can always contact our Reference and Instruction staff at himmelfarb@gwu.edu, or connect with us via our Ask Us chat service.
Do you sometimes have to walk on campus alone after dark? Would you like to have a way to quickly alert authorities of a potentially dangerous situation, or reach someone who can help by phone?
GW’s Division of Safety and Security has an app that can help! The Guardian app is free to the GW community and can be downloaded here for iPhone or Android. The app provides quick access to GW and non-GW support services like the GW Office of Advocacy of Support, the National Sexual Assault Hotline, the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and Poison Control. There is a button to immediately connect to GW Police & EMeRG (GW's volunteer EMS agency) and a button for 911 services.
A Safety Timer feature allows a family member or friend to be your guardian while traveling. Set a timer for your trip to alert your guardian if you don’t arrive within the anticipated time. You can alert them or GW PD to your location.
The app can also be customized to include critical information about you if you are in an accident or in a medical emergency. This includes contact information and your medical history.
Off campus the Guardian app provides advisories and alerts for your area as well as for the GW campus. The alerts can be set as push notifications to your phone.
In an effort to remain accountable to communities who have been negatively impacted by past and present medical injustices, the staff at Himmelfarb Library is committed to the work of maintaining an anti-discriminatory practice. We will uplift and highlight diverse stories throughout the year, and not shy away from difficult conversations necessary for health sciences education. To help fulfill this mission, this week’s blog post will cover Dr. Charles R. Drew.
Born June 3, 1904 in Washington DC, Charles Richard Drew was an African-American physician whose research and scholarship on blood banks had such a profound impact that we still feel the ramifications of his work decades after his death.
Though he grew up in a segregated city, the African-American community in Washington DC was filled with well-educated, civic-minded families. At an early age, Drew learned the importance of a formal education and engagement with your community which impacted his future medical career. While Drew was a great student, he was a far better athlete. After graduating from Dunbar High School in 1922, he attended Amherst College in Massachusetts on an athletic scholarship, where he was an important member of the track and football teams. There are several factors that eventually led to Drew pursuing a career in the medical field. He credits his biology teacher, Otto Glaser, with helping him develop an interest in medicine and science. In 1920, his oldest sister, Elsie, died from complications from influenza and during his college years, he was severely injured and temporarily hospitalized. These experiences pushed him to learn more about medicine and were the foundations of him eventually becoming a physician.
After graduating from Amherst College in 1926, Drew worked for Morgan College (now Morgan State University) as an athletic director and instructor of biology and chemistry. He put aside money to help finance his medical school education. At the time, there were only a few medical institutions that allowed African-Americans to enroll in their programs. He applied to Howard University College of Medicine, but was denied admission. He was accepted into the medical program at Harvard, but the school wanted to defer his enrollment until the following year. Eventually, Drew moved to Canada and studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal. He graduated from the university in 1933 and completed his internship and surgical residency at Montreal General Hospital, where he would meet professor John Beattie, whose work on transfusion influenced Drew when he researched blood bank capabilities. In 1935, Drew returned to the United States to work for Howard University College of Medicine.
In 1940, Drew was tapped to direct the Blood for Britain project. At the time, Great Britain was under attacked by Germany and was in need of blood and plasma. Thanks to Drew’s research on ‘banking’ blood, he was knowledgeable on how to collect and safely store blood for later transfusion without the blood and fluids losing their effectiveness while outside the body. His work as the Blood for Britain project was so successful that he was later appointed as the assistant director of a national blood banking systems program. This program was jointly sponsored by the National Research Council and the American Red Cross.
Drew still faced discrimination and frustration within the medical community in regards to its treatment of the African-American community. He spoke out against the discriminatory practices that barred African-Americans from blood donation. Eventually the policy was amended, but African-American blood was kept separate from blood donated by white donors. Drew was also highly critical of the medical communities’ exclusion of Black physicians from national organizations, such as the American Medical Association.
Drew continued to work to uplift the education standards for Black physicians and remained an outspoken critic of discriminatory policies and practices within the medical community. He died on April 1, 1950 after sustaining serious injuries after a car accident. Though he died at a young age, Drew’s research would continue to have an impact on the medical community and would receive recognition and awards for decades to come. Throughout Washington DC and the country, there are buildings and landmarks that honor the late Dr. Charles Drew and his legacy.
This blog article serves to provide a brief glimpse into the life and research of Dr. Charles Drew. To learn more about this prolific figure or to read some of his research, check out the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s collection titled, The Charles R. Drew Papers, which feature photographs, scholarly research, personal letters and other artefacts from the doctor’s life. You can also browse Himmelfarb Library’s collection for articles related to Drew and his research.
Are you planning to write a literature review? A recent article in the journal Naturemay be able to help. The author of the article titled How to write a superb literature review asked editors and researchers to share their tips:
Be focused and avoid jargon. Wenting Zhao, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, says that a good literature review should offer a focused discussion on a particular topic. He notes that a well written review should avoid jargon and explain basic concepts to readers who are new to the field.
Have a process and develop your style. Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, Bozhi Tian, states that once the purpose of the review has been decided, he tries to create a team of students and researchers with different areas of expertise so that a variety of perspectives are considered. The team then works on a review outline, conducts the literature search, and writes the review, being careful to include fresh ideas and not repeat the content of other published reviews.
Timeliness and figures make a huge difference. Ankita Anirban, Editor of Nature Reviews Physics, who evaluates reviews for publication, says that the best reviews are timely and explain why readers should pay attention to the topic. She points out that the most interesting reviews provide a discussion about disagreements in the field and feature figures to illustrate the science and the data.
Stay updated and be open to suggestions. Yoojin Choi, Research Assistant Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, stresses the importance of staying abreast of the literature in order to provide the most up-to-date and unique review (setting up search alerts can help with this). Being open to suggestions from colleagues and peer-reviewers ensures a well written article.
Make good use of technology. Paula Martin-Gonzalez, PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the UK, noted the difficulty she had in finding all of the seminal articles related to her research topic. She created code for a small application that helped make her literature search more efficient and hopes to build a more user-friendly tool to help other researchers.
One of the most valuable parts of this article is the comparison of reference manager software and collaborative writing tools - information including cost, level of user support, whether the product can be used with Google Docs is nicely displayed in table format.
