Day: September 3, 2013

Do you want to find some tools to help you communicate to clients or colleagues about interventions? Would you like to see some tools to help you summarize and evaluate your research? Need to brush up on calculating odds ratios or understanding confidence intervals? Then you might want to visit the NCCMT’s website.

The National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (NCCMT) has put together a website full of innovative, high quality, up-to-date methods and tools. It aims to share what works in public health with public health managers, professionals, public health practitioners, policy makers and researchers.

Their website has videos and webcasts in the multimedia section that help you understand research evidence, present stories from the field, and lay out the steps for Evidence-Informed Public Health. EIPH is the process of finding, appraising, distilling and disseminating the best available evidence from research and using that evidence to inform and improve health policy and practice.

You will also find a Registry of Methods and Tools section under the Resources tab. This registry has over 100 methods and tools available on topics such as communication, economic evaluation, situational assessment, and stakeholder analysis and engagement, among many others.

The National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools (NCCMT) is one of six National Collaborating Centres for Public Health in Canada. The NCCMT provides leadership and expertise in sharing what works in public health.

Check out this information and more on the NCCMT website.

Ever wonder what’s in the dietary supplements that you or someone you know is taking? Now researchers, health care providers, and consumers can find this out. The Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) will let you search out the ingredients listed on the labels of about 18,000 (and growing) dietary supplements.

This free database is hosted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is the result of collaboration between the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

You’ll find information here about ingredients in brand-name products, including name, form, active and inactive ingredients, amount of active ingredient/unit, manufacturer/distributor information, suggested dose, label claims, warnings, percentage of daily value, and further label information.

Supplements in the database include vitamins, minerals, herbals and botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, and more. They come in many different forms, including tablets, capsules, and powders, as well as liquids and energy bars.

See the DSLD for more information.

Ever wonder what the difference is between MEDLINE, PubMed, and PubMed Central? You’re not alone. While all are part of the National Library of Medicine family, they each have their own characteristics.

MEDLINE is the granddaddy of these three. It started in the 1960’s and now provides the citations of medical-related journal articles back to 1946. It indexes approximately 5,600 scholarly journals from around the world. These journals are selected by an NIH committee. The MEDLINE database can be searched in PubMed as well as other services that license it.

PubMed has been available since 1996. Citations in it primarily come from MEDLINE; in-process citations, some out-of-scope articles, ahead of print articles, and others including citations supplied by publishers. It also includes citations to the books, and in some cases book chapters, in the NCBI Bookshelf.

PubMed Central (PMC) began in 2000. It is a free full-text archive for biomedical and life sciences journal articles. PMC serves as a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other research funding agencies. As you may know, publishers can delay the release of their material in PMC for a short period after publication (often called an embargo). There are reciprocal links between the full text in PMC and corresponding citations in PubMed. Some PMC content, such as book reviews, is not cited in PubMed.

Next month we’ll look at the differences between two other sources of health information from the National Library of Medicine: MedLinePlus and PubMed Health.

More details on the differences between MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC is available here.

The Public Health Library has the following new books available:

1. Health economics, 5th ed. Charles E Phelps. By Boston: Pearson, 2013.
Call number: RA410 .P48 2013.

2. The silent epidemic: coal and the hidden threat to health.
By Alan H Lockwood. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012.
Call number: TD195.C58 L63 2012.

3. Community organizing and community building for health and welfare, 3rd ed. By Meredith Minkler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Call number: RA427.8 .C64 2012.

4. Global health governance. By Jeremy R Youde. Cambridge; Malden, MA:
Polity Press, 2012.
Call number: RA441 .Y683 2012.

5. Essentials of toxicology for health protection: a handbook for
field professionals, 2nd ed. By David Baker, Professor.; et al.
Oxford University Press, 2012.
Call number: RA1215 .E87 2012.

Please note that these books are only a small selection of what is newly available. If you are interested in checking out any book(s), submit a request using our online form and we will mail the book(s) to you.

You may also log into your web portal account to request book(s).

If you do not currently possess a UC Berkeley library card, you will need to apply for one before we can check out a book to you.