Monday, September 28, 2009

JAMA Sees Drop in Industry Financed Research

Medical Journals See a Cost to Fighting Industry-Backed Research

The Journal of the American Medical Association saw a 21 percent drop in industry-financed research after it began requiring that data in company-sponsored medical trials be independently verified by university researchers, a study has concluded.

The study, by a team of medical researchers in England and Florida, found that two of JAMA’s competitors saw their proportions of industry-backed research grow after JAMA decided to impose the requirement in 2005 to deter companies from shading descriptions of medical-test results to favor their products.

The findings suggest JAMA could face significant financial pressure to abandon the policy, given the reliance of medical journals on corporate dollars, said one of the study’s authors, Benjamin Djulbegovic, a professor of medicine and oncology at the University of South Florida.

http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5

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Monday, September 21, 2009

*NLM Technical Bulletin, Sep-Oct 2009, Preview of PubMed Redesign Coming

*NLM Technical Bulletin, Sep-Oct 2009, Preview of PubMed Redesign Coming http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_update_on_redesign.html

September 11, 2009 [posted]

Preview of PubMed® Redesign Coming

The redesign of the PubMed interface was announced in May (see: PubMed® Redesign 2009). Very soon a link on the PubMed homepage will connect to a preview version. The preview version will enable users to try out the new interface and is expected to run for at least two weeks after which PubMed will exist in the redesigned version. No changes to URLs will be necessary.

One aspect of the redesign affects display formats. There will be three of interest to most users: Summary, Abstract, and MEDLINE. The AbstractPlus and Citation formats will be retired as the Abstract format will combine aspects of both, e.g., Related Articles titles and MeSH® vocabulary. Any saved searches or links that were created with the Citation or AbstractPlus formats will eventually default to the new Abstract format.

A number of changes will be made to Advanced Search and My NCBI as a result of the redesign.

Watch for an upcoming article with more information about the redesign.

By Annette M. Nahin
MEDLARS Management Section

Nahin AM. Preview of PubMed® Redesign Coming. NLM Tech Bull. 2009 Sep-Oct;(370):e9.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

ScienceDirect Down - Sat., Sep. 19th

ScienceDirect, the online platform for Elsevier journals, will be down for scheduled maintenance this Saturday, Sept. 19, starting at 2 a.m. until 3 p.m. Hawaii time.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa currently has access to approximately 2,000 journals via ScienceDirect.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

University of California, San Francisco: Drug Industry Document Archive

Drug Industry Document Archive from University of California, San Francisco

http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/

This archive will be of particular importance to those with an interest in public health, public policy, and the general activities of pharmaceutical companies.

The Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA), created by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), contains over 1500 documents related to pharmaceutical industry clinical trials, publication of study results, pricing, marketing,and relations with physicians. Many of these documents were previously secret and were only made public as a result of lawsuits filed against a number of prominent pharmaceutical companies. First-time visitors may wish to start by clicking on "TheDocuments" link on the homepage. Here they can read about some of the crucial lawsuits that generated the documents featured in this archive.