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We’d like to welcome everyone joining the SMHS, GW Nursing and GWSPH communities this month! Himmelfarb Library has a wealth of resources and services to meet your patient care, education, and research needs and you don’t need to visit the building to take advantage of most of what we offer. Our electronic collections are available 24/7 from anywhere, on campus or off campus when using VPN or web authentication services.  

Himmelfarb Resources and Collections

Himmelfarb has 125 databases to search, including PubMed, Scopus, and our library discovery service Health Information @ Himmelfarb. Health Information @ Himmelfarb enables users to search physical and electronic books, journals, articles, dissertations, and more from one search box.

To browse and access our collection of e-journals we recommend using BrowZine. BrowZine can be accessed on a browser or you can download the app to your IOS or Android device. You can assemble a personalized bookshelf of journal titles, follow your favorite journals, and be alerted to new issues with a table of contents.

We also recommend installing LibKey Nomad on your favorite browser for easy access to full-text when searching PubMed, Scopus, EBSCO databases, Google Scholar, Amazon, publisher sites, and more. Nomad will alert you to the full-text availability of articles and e-books from Himmelfarb and in many cases deliver a PDF with one click.

Himmelfarb provides a wide range of electronic book titles from Access Medicine, ClinicalKey, EBSCOhost, and R2 Digital Library. You can browse our e-book collections or view our special collections in Health Information @ Himmelfarb. We also have many print books! Our main book collection is on the basement level and most books can be borrowed for 3 weeks with up to 2 renewals.

If we don’t have what you need, we can get it for you through the Consortium Loan Service or Documents2Go. Consortium Loan Service provides free loans of materials from most of the academic libraries in the DC metro area. Documents2Go provides scanned article and chapter copies or physical book loans with up to 30 free requests for Himmelfarb users a year.

Clinical Tools and Applications

For those providing patient care, Himmelfarb has specialized apps and information services to support you. DynaMed, Lexicomp, and others are available to be downloaded as apps for easy access from your device. Check our App Shelf to browse for tools.

For residents specifically, we offer NEJM Resident 360. This resource contains interactive cases, videos, rotation prep materials, clinical pearls, morning reports, and more! To learn more about NEJM Resident 360 and our many resources for residents, check out our Residents and Fellows Research Guide.

Research Support

Himmelfarb can support you in your research from helping with literature searches or systematic reviews to organizing sources with RefWorks or Covidence. We can even assist with your data management and sharing plan if you are applying for NIH funding. See our Resources for Early Career Research Guide if you’re just getting started with research. Our Scholarly Publishing tutorials are a great way to learn about all aspects of the scholarly publishing lifecycle at your own pace. For more seasoned researchers, we offer a Research Profile Audit Service to get the most out of the various profile services, like ORCiD and SciENcv.

24/7 Access

For most of the academic year, the Himmelfarb Library facility is open 24/7. We will be observing shorter hours during the month of July - but will still be open nightly until midnight. Note that from June 12 to July 26, 2023 entry to both Himmelfarb Library and Ross Hall will be through the Himmelfarb courtyard entrance doors from 7pm to 7am Monday through Friday and on weekends. You need your GWorld badge to enter the library. There is space for quiet conversation and group work on the first floor and quieter spaces for study on the second floor. Reserve our study rooms in advance. 

Can’t come to the library? Our librarians can assist you via chat or phone (202-994-2850) during business hours or email us anytime at himmelfarb@gwu.edu. We look forward to seeing you in the library or assisting you remotely!

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In January the NIH implemented new policies requiring that research data be managed, archived, and shared using a data management and sharing plan that must be submitted as part of any new grant application. These policies encourage data re-use and reproducibility, increase transparency, and enable researchers to build on previous work.

Himmelfarb Library’s NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) Research Guide brings data management and sharing services and resources together for easy reference and instruction. The guide can step you through the process of determining what data needs to be shared and archived, putting together a data management plan, finding a data storage solution, and/or an open data repository for sharing.

Templates for data management plans are helpful development tools. DMPTool provides a variety of templates, including the NIH_GEN DMSP (2023) template specifically for NIH funding. You can find it and other sources for templates on the DMSP guide Getting Started tab. NIH recently released 13 additional sample templates on its website, including templates for genomic and survey data. The Survey and Interview Data (Sample Plan M) includes language related to data that can't be shared.

Finding an appropriate open data repository for storage and sharing can be a challenge. The NIH-supported Scientific Data Repositories site is useful for finding specialized repositories. For more generalist data, NIH began the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) and has partnered with seven organizations that offer open repositories, including figshare, Mendeley Data, OSF, and DRYAD. More information about these repositories, including recorded webinars, is on NIH’s GREI website.

The June R01 deadline has just passed, meaning that the next submission date is in October. If you’re planning to apply for NIH funding, don’t put off work on a data management and sharing plan! Start now and reach out to data specialists at GW with your questions. Sara Hoover, Metadata and Scholarly Publishing Librarian is the contact at Himmelfarb Library. You can reach Sara at shoover@gwu.edu. Additionally, Gelman Library offers data management consultation services. Librarians can answer your questions or refer them to other University research services for assistance, including the OVPR, Office of Sponsored Projects, the Office of Research Integrity, and the Office of Clinical Research.

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Portrait of Beethoven by Scott Gentling
Scott Gentling (1942-2011).Beethoven.[undated].Graphite on paper.Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.2018.70, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Beethoven, one of the great musical geniuses of the 19th century, was deaf when he wrote some of his best known works. He had progressive hearing loss starting in his 20’s and was functionally deaf during his late period when he wrote his most expressive and innovative sonatas, string quartets, and the Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy). Beethoven also suffered from gastrointestinal symptoms most of his adult life and died of liver failure. In 1802, he requested that his medical conditions be disclosed to the public after his death in a letter to his brothers known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Historians and musicologists have speculated if he had a heritable disorder or infectious disease that contributed to his hearing loss and death. Alcoholism was suspected as a factor in his liver disease. There was a family history of alcohol dependence and some of his associates claimed he drank heavily, though others said he did not drink more than was typical at that time.

Recent advances in ancient DNA methods presented an opportunity to learn more about Beethoven’s medical conditions. A team of 32 international researchers used eight surviving locks of Beethoven’s hair for their analysis. Several locks were taken by friends when Beethoven died in 1827 and others were given to friends and associates while he was alive.  Over the years they were sold and passed down to others and the provenance of some were questionable. The locks were analyzed in this new study to determine their authenticity, using a novel geo-genetic triangulation technique. Additionally, the researchers “analyzed Beethoven’s genome for genetic causes of and risk for somatic disorders in addition to metagenomic screening for evidence of infections, followed by targeted DNA capture.” (Begg, et al, 2023)

Five of the locks were determined to originate from a single individual or monozygotic twins and had damage patterns that authenticated them for early 19th century origin. A non-matching lock called the Hiller lock was used in previous genetic and forensic testing featured in the book and movie, Beethoven’s Hair. It was found to be from a woman, invalidating results indicating lead poisoning as a contributor to Beethoven’s hearing loss and other maladies.

Analysis on the Y chromosome revealed a surprise finding. Five living men from the Beethoven patrilineage had a common ancestor in Aert van Beethoven (1535-1609). But their Y chromosomes did not match with any of the five authenticated Beethoven hair samples. The researchers conclude that there was at least one extra pair paternity event in Beethoven’s ancestry. Further analysis of descendants of Beethoven’s brother Karl leaves open the possibility that the two may have been half brothers.

Beethoven’s GI symptoms were consistent with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. His hearing loss could have been associated. Other possible related causes for the hearing loss were otosclerosis, sarcoidosis or systemic lupus erythematosus. A genome wide association study eliminated most of these as possibilities, except for lupus where there was some elevated polygenic risk. 

Celiac disease and lactose intolerance were both eliminated as possible causes of his gastrointestinal symptoms through testing for associated alleles. He actually had some elevated genetic protections against irritable bowel syndrome, making it also unlikely. 

They analyzed 55 genes where variants could cause monogenic post-lingual hearing loss and 209 related to pre-lingual hearing loss. There were no positive findings.

In summary, we could not reliably evaluate most hypothesized multifactorial causes of Beethoven’s hearing loss, nor did we identify a monogenic origin.”

(Begg, et al, 2023)

Beethoven’s polygenic risk for liver cirrhosis was found to be elevated in his PNPLA3 gene and his HFE gene. This combined with heavy drinking could have caused his liver failure. Additionally, hepatitis B DNA was found in the Stumpff Lock hair which was the best preserved sample. Researchers could not tell how long he’d had the hepatitis B infection. The positive lock was taken at his death and represented the final months of his life. Tristan Begg, the lead author of the study, wrote more about the possible role of hepatitis B in Beethoven’s liver failure on William Meredith’s blog. Meredith is a Beethoven scholar who participated in the genome study.

Though not addressed directly in the paper, the study brings to an end the theory that Beethoven was black. Noting the similarities in their appearance, the bi-racial composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the first to raise the possibility. Many contemporaries of Beethoven described him as dark, brown or ruddy in complexion and noted his broad, rounded nose which can be seen in his life mask taken in 1812. The idea has persisted since Coleridge-Taylor introduced it, and was repeated by Malcolm X and a 1969 Rolling Stones article titled “Beethoven was black and proud!” More recently it was the subject of scholarly articles and even a Twitter meme. This genomic analysis confirms that Beethoven’s ancestry was greater than 99% European, with the strongest autosomal match with present day North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.

Although there was no definitive finding on Beethoven’s hearing loss, there was plenty to advance the existing knowledge base and establish leads for future research. The study demonstrates how much can be learned from a few strands of centuries old hair through new genetic analysis tools.

References

Begg TJA, Schmidt A, Kocher A, et al. Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven. Curr Biol. 2023 Apr 24;33(8):1431-1447.e22. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.041. Epub 2023 Mar 22. PMID: 36958333.

Clark P. ‘Beethoven was black’: why the radical idea still has power today. The Guardian. 7 Sep 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/07/beethoven-was-black-why-the-radical-idea-still-has-power-today

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Jewish American Heritage Month dates to 2006 when it was first proclaimed by then President George W Bush in reflection of the 350th anniversary of Jews first arriving in America.  A group of 23 Sephardic Jews fled persecution in Dutch Brazil during the Portuguese Inquisition and arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1654.

Since then the Jewish community has been an important contributor to American culture and prosperity, including many discoveries and advances in medicine. These were achieved despite barriers to becoming health professionals that existed well into the 20th century. Limited quotas for Jewish enrollment were quietly instituted in medical schools and post-graduate training in the 1920’s and there is evidence that the quotas continued until the 1950s. 

The quotas were in response to a wave of immigration by Russian and Eastern European Jews from the 1880s to 1920. Many of these immigrants and their children pursued medical training, due to their high esteem for medicine as a profession and the pathway it provided to a middle class life in America.  The number of Jewish physicians who graduated from medical colleges in 10 major US cities increased from 7 in 1875-1880 to 2,313 in 1931-35. 

Following World War I,  the rise of nativism and anti-Semitism in the United States was reflected in the growth of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and anti-immigrant groups.  Russian and Eastern European Jews were particularly discriminated against due to prejudice about their culture, countries of origin and suspected revolutionary ideologies, as well as their religion. The institutions that Jewish medical students were entering were largely private, Protestant universities and colleges and there was growing pressure to keep their numbers down, resulting in both official and unacknowledged quotas. 

“In an era in which it was estimated that 32-50% of U.S. medical school applicants were Jews, the medical historian Henry Sigerist wrote that “Jewish students are subject to a tacit, but nevertheless highly effective, quota-system and in most schools the number of Jewish students rarely exceeds 10 per cent. …”

(Halperin, 2019)

The president of Harvard in the 1920s, A. Lawrence Lowell, was a member of the Immigration Restriction League and openly endorsed admission quotas. Columbia and Yale both had explicit quotas starting in 1918 and 1920. At Yale, the admissions committee was to admit no more than 5 Jewish students per medical class.  The University of Michigan began requiring interviews for entry to medical school in the late 1920s and subsequently rejected many Jewish applicants based on their personalities.  Many schools also required disclosure of religion and family background on applications.

“A 1946 review of thirty-nine U.S. medical school application forms showed that all asked the applicant’s religious preference or affiliation, ten asked for the religion of the applicant’s parents, fifteen asked the parents’ race, and eleven inquired if the family name had ever been changed.”

(Halperin, 2001)

As the Second World War ended, attitudes began to change and there was increased sympathy for the Jewish community and Holocaust survivors in the US. Jewish associations worked to enact anti-discriminatory education policies and had the support of President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education. The state of New York and city of Philadelphia both launched investigations into the quota system, exposing it to the public. New York’s Hart Report found that Jews, African-Americans and Italian Roman Catholics were selectively denied admission to the medical schools at Cornell and Columbia. The State University of New York system was founded in the wake of the Hart report, creating new public medical schools in the state.  Several Jewish medical schools were established in the 1950s including Albert Einstein Medical College and Mt Sinai School of Medicine. 

The AMA and AAMC did little to investigate or condemn the quota system. In 1947 when the two organizations published findings of a survey of medical schools, they defended the practice of asking questions about race, religion and family background on applications and opposed anti-discriminatory policies saying they would interfere with school’s freedom to select students “who will most advance the quality of medical education.” 

Despite all of these challenges, the achievements of Jewish physicians and medical researchers in the 20th century are remarkable. We can thank them for the polio and hepatitis b vaccines, the invention of Novocain and streptomycin, pioneering surgical procedures, and important genetic advances.  See this Wikipedia entry for a list of the many Jewish American Nobel laureates in Physiology and Medicine.

References

Halperin E. (2001) The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920–1955, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 56(2), 140–167. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/56.2.140

Halperin E. (2019). Why Did the United States Medical School Admissions Quota for Jews End? The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 358(5), 317–325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjms.2019.08.005

Sokoloff L. (1992). The rise and decline of the Jewish quota in medical school admissions. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 68(4), 497–518.

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Healthcare professional with stethoscope holding smart phone image by Ivan Samkov on Pexels
Photo by Ivan Samkov on Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-in-medical-gown-using-a-smartphone-4989177/

Himmelfarb Library offers a couple of apps to help stay current with health sciences literature. Browzine is an e-journals app that allows users to follow publications the library subscribes to.  Search by title, ISSN, or subject to find your favorite journals and then set up a personal bookshelf for easy access to table of contents and full-text, or have table of contents sent to you via a notification feature when new issues are available. Browzine integrates with Zotero, Mendeley, and RefWorks to help you organize (and cite!) the articles you read. You can also download full-text for offline reading. Set up a free account by accessing Browzine and selecting My BookShelf.  You can download the app from the Apple and Google app stores.

Read by QxMD is another app that allows you to follow specific health sciences journals or subject areas.  Read is like a social media app that will tailor your feed based on what you like or follow. The primary content source for Read is PubMed and new articles become available in Read as they are added to the PubMed database. Read recently began including preprint content from medRxiv, bioRxiv, and Research Square. Note that there is some sponsored content on Read which is highlighted and identified as promoted. 

Read recently introduced 2 Minute Medicine Collections that feature a brief synopsis of newly published articles in a specialty. Each article’s level of evidence is indicated. 

Screenshots of Read by QxMD 2 Minute Medicine collections and article summary.
Read by QxMD 2 Minute Medicine Collections and Summary

Read is a current awareness tool that relies on keyword searching and algorithms for article retrieval.  It is not recommended for in depth research or finding the best evidence for patient care. For complex queries that need regular update, consider setting up a database alert from PubMed or Scopus.  Instructions for setting up an alert are on the Keeping Up with Health Sciences Information Research Guide, or reach out to our reference team at himmelfarb@gwu.edu or library chat for assistance.

Download the Read app for either Apple or Android devices and set up a free account. Choosing George Washington University as your institution will provide access to Himmelfarb Library subscription full-text as well as open access content. Once your account is set up you can choose to follow topics based on keyword search, specialty, specific journals, or curated collections. You can also set up your own collections and opt to share them.

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In 2021, UNESCO developed a Recommendation on Open Science to be adopted by member states. This recommendation evolved from a 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers promoting science as a common good. 

UNESCO’s Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers, https://youtu.be/94T7NGirUlM

The Recommendation on Open Science includes a definition of open science:

Open science is … an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society, and to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community. It comprises all scientific disciplines and aspects of scholarly practices, including basic and applied sciences, natural and social sciences and the humanities, and it builds on the following key pillars: open scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems.

(UNESCO, 2021.)

The recommendation calls for scientific publications, research data, software and source code to be open and available to scientists internationally. The NIH adopted an open access policy for manuscripts resulting from funded research in 2008. Early this year the NIH adopted a policy requiring that all newly funded grants include a data management and sharing plan to make the underlying research data freely available to other researchers.  For more information on the data sharing policy and how to comply, explore our Research Guide.

Platforms that support the sharing and dissemination of research findings and their underlying data are becoming available. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a “free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration”. It provides tools to design a study, collect and analyze data, and publish and share results. OSF was designed and is maintained by the non-profit Center for Open Science. 

A helpful feature of OSF is the ability to generate a unique, persistent URL (uniform resource locator) for a project for sharing and attribution. There is also built-in version control and collaborators can be assigned a hierarchical level of permissions for data and document management. Researchers can decide to make all or parts of a project public and searchable and add licensing. Public projects can be searched on the OSF site. Registering a project creates a timestamped version for preservation. Pre-prints can also be hosted and made available for searching.

OSF has integrations with a number of useful tools including storage add-ons like Amazon S3, Google Drive, DropBox and figshare. Zotero and Mendeley can be integrated for citation management and GitHub can be used for managing software and code. 

Institutions can set up a custom landing page for OSF and build user communities to promote sharing and collaboration within the institution and beyond. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and NYU are among the many research universities that are using OSF in this way.

Last month Nature and Code Ocean announced a partnership to launch and curate Open Science Library. The Open Science Library contains research software used in Nature journal articles. “Compute capsules” which include the code, data, and computing environment will allow researchers to reproduce results, re-use the code, and collaborate. As open science becomes the norm, more multifunction platforms that enhance sharing and reproducibility while preserving work and ensuring attribution will continue to emerge.

References:

UNESCO. (2021). UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949.locale=en

UNESCO. (2017). Consolidated Report on the Implementation by Member States of the 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379704

Foster, E. D., & Deardorff, A. (2017). Open Science Framework (OSF). Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 105(2), 203–206. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.88

Code Ocean. (2023). Code Ocean Partners with Nature Portfolio to Launch the Open Science Library with Ready-to-Run Software from Authors in Nature Journals (Press Release). https://codeocean.com/press-release/code-ocean-partners-with-nature-portfolio-open-science-library/

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LibKey Nomad is a free browser plug-in that will alert you to the availability of full-text content from Himmelfarb Library and provide buttons to immediately download a PDF version or view the content on the publisher site. Previously Nomad only worked for scholarly articles. Now Nomad also works for e-books! 

Screenshot of a LibKey Nomad alert and link in a publisher site to an e-book in Himmelfarb Library's collections.
LibKey Nomad alert and link for a Himmelfarb Library e-book in a publisher website.

When Himmelfarb has the e-book, LibKey Nomad will alert you when viewing books on Amazon, Google Books and publisher websites including Wiley, Elsevier, Cambridge, Thieme, Wolters-Kluwer, Springer, SAGE, Taylor and Francis and many others. If you need a book for academic, patient care, research or personal needs, LibKey Nomad will pop up with a notification and a link if you already have access to it for free from the library.  

LibKey Nomad works in a variety of web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Vivaldi) and websites. If you’re searching Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science and even Wikipedia, LibKey Nomad integrates full-text access directly from where you find the content. LibKey Nomad will even tell you if an article has been retracted. 

To use LibKey Nomad, install it as a browser plug-in and choose ‘George Washington University - Himmelfarb Library’ as your home library when prompted. If you already have it installed, you will now be alerted to e-book content when searching.

Have questions about Nomad or other ways to find and view full-text content? Contact Himmelfarb’s Information desk at himmelfarb@gwu.edu or chat with us during business hours.

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GW Medical Student Research Day is scheduled for Wednesday, April 26, 2023 as a live in-person event at the University Student Center. There will be a plenary speaker and students will have an opportunity to share their research projects with a poster and oral presentation. Videos of past poster presentations are available on our Research Guide and YouTube channel.

Research poster abstract checklist image and March 1st submission due date

Poster abstracts for Medical Student Research Day 2023 will be due on March 1st, a week from today! If you’re just starting to put an abstract together, or putting on the finishing touches, Himmelfarb Library has resources to help. 

You can find much of what you need on our Research Day Resources: Writing Abstracts page. The guide outlines the basic components of a scientific abstract and provides both recommendations and examples for producing a quality abstract. 

If you need more help you can chat our reference librarians or make an appointment with the GW Writing Center. The Writing Center now has Thursday hours from 6-8pm at Himmelfarb Library. We recommend scheduling an appointment in advance by calling 202-994-3765. 

If your poster abstract is accepted, congratulations! Come back to our GW Research Day Resources Research Guide for valuable information and tips for designing a winning poster and presenting it effectively.

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This semester Himmelfarb Library welcomes back the GW Writing Center! We are gratified to be able to host this valuable service and make it more convenient for the health sciences community to get feedback and support to improve their writing.

Image of GW Writing Center banner and consulting space in Himmelfarb Library
GW Writing Center consulting space on Himmelfarb Library's first floor.

Starting February 16th, the Writing Center will have a consultant available Thursdays from 6-8pm on Himmelfarb Library’s first floor. To book an appointment, call 202-994-3765 during Writing Center operating hours.  They also welcome drop ins!

The Writing Center provides assistance with a variety of writing needs including research reports, speeches, group project reports, cover letters and CVs, and even written take-home exams if the professor permits. Services are provided by student consultants. Consultants who specialize in public health and STEM writing, or have expertise in APA citation style, can be found here. Some appointment preparation is encouraged prior to consulting sessions.

Himmelfarb Library can help you with bibliography formatting and citation style. We have Research Guides on APA and AMA citation style format with all the information you need in one place, including example citations for all material formats. We can also assist you with the use of citation managers like RefWorks. You can reach out to our reference librarians via Chat or by emailing himmelfarb@gwu.edu for direct assistance if required.

Find other resources on scientific writing in our collection.

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