Your Guide to Health Research: Databases and Support at Kellogg Library

March 14, 2025 Kristy Leave a Comment

The Kellogg Health Sciences Library provides access to reliable and trustworthy information and data to support teaching, learning, and research in health, medicine, and dentistry. Our collection includes top bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and more.

In addition to providing access to these resources, our health sciences librarians offer guidance and instruction on advanced search techniques to help you get the most out of these databases.

Key Biomedical Databases

A thorough search often involves multiple databases, as no single resource indexes all the world’s literature. Below, we highlight two of the largest biomedical databases and how to access them.

Embase

Embase is a comprehensive biomedical database with strong international coverage. It indexes over 45 million records from more than 8,400 journals, including unique non-English content. Embase is available to the Dalhousie community through our libraries subscription. To help you navigate this resource, the Libraries offer an 8-minute tutorial on Embase search techniques.

MEDLINE

MEDLINE, produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA, indexes more than 37 million records from over 5,600 journals. Dalhousie faculty, staff, and students can access MEDLINE through two search interfaces:

PubMed: A free public interface supported by the NLM and NIH. Check out our short intro video for getting started with PubMed.
Ovid MEDLINE: A subscription-based interface with additional search features. Watch our short intro video on getting started with Ovid MEDLINE.

Please note: If one of these search interfaces is disrupted, try using the other or switch to an alternative biomedical literature database such as Embase.

Access Issues and Alternative Resources

If you experience difficulty accessing a library information source, please report it using our Report a Problem Accessing E-Resources form. While we work to resolve issues, it may take time, so it is important to know about alternative sources for your teaching, learning, or research.

Disruptions can occur due to vendor updates, technological issues, or changes in funding and support, either from the publisher or the university. If a particular database is unavailable, try switching to a different interface or using another biomedical database.

Providing access to reliable health information is a core value at Dalhousie Libraries—especially in times of uncertainty. We are committed to ensuring you have the resources you need.

Get Help from a Librarian

Health sciences librarians at the Kellogg Library are graduate-trained information professionals who specialize in helping students, faculty, and healthcare practitioners find and use high-quality research.

They provide expert support for:

Conducting advanced literature searches.
Navigating and evaluating clinical guidelines, medical literature, and research data.
Supporting evidence-based healthcare decisions and health professions education.

Librarians play a key role in helping healthcare practitioners make informed decisions, supporting trainees in their learning, and facilitating robust research to support the health of our communities. For personalized assistance, contact us at kellogg@dal.ca.

Call for 2025 OER Development Grant Applications

January 9, 2025 Kristy Leave a Comment

The Council of Atlantic Academic Libraries has called for applications for AtlanticOER Development Grants. Funding is provided by the four Atlantic provinces (New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island).

AtlanticOER Development Grants provide financial support to instructors in the Atlantic Region creating and adapting new Open Educational Resources. The goal is to support instructors to increase the availability of quality, free, openly licensed resources to support student learning. You can apply for three different funding tiers, depending on the scope of your project. The tiers are:

Tier 1: Creating an Open Textbook (up to $7,000) – This funding is intended for the development of a new open textbook. The topic should not be covered in an already existing open textbook. This tier is meant for creation projects at a larger scale.

Tier 2: Adaptation of an Existing Open Textbook (up to $4,000) – This funding is intended for substantive adaptation projects. Sometimes it can be possible to find an open textbook that covers foundational knowledge but needs to be adjusted. For example, the textbook might require adjustments to ensure it adheres to local educational standards, or adjustments might be made to make it relevant to the local context (eg, an American business textbook may need adjustments to make it suitable for a Canadian business context), or new examples and interactive elements may be added to a book.

Tier 3: Creation of Ancillary Materials (up to $1,000) – This funding is intended for smaller creation projects. Ancillary materials can be defined as course materials that are meant to supplement and support a textbook. Examples of ancillary materials include: slide decks, interactive tutorials, and quiz and test banks. Often, ancillary materials can enhance student learning.

The application period closes on February 14, 2025.

Planned DalSpace Repository Updates & Outages

October 8, 2024 Kristy Leave a Comment

The DalSpace theses repository will undergo updates during October 15-22. These updates will address issues and ensure ongoing functionality.

From October 15-22 users will experience outages. Please avoid uploads and deposits until the update is completed after October 22.

If you have any questions about the update, please contact dalspace@dal.ca.

May 5 is Red Dress Day

May 5, 2024 Marlo MacKay Leave a Comment

The Red Dress Day exhibit in the Ko’jua Okuom in the Killam Memorial Library.

May 5 is Red Dress Day, a day of honouring missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Learn more about Red Dress Day.

Learn more about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) by reading the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Health Sciences Study Tools at the Library

January 5, 2024 Kristy Leave a Comment

By Catherine Gracey and Hailey Wills

Now that the school year is well underway, the W.K. Kellogg Health Science Library is pleased to highlight resources that can help you prepare for learning and clinical placements, as well as practice for upcoming licensing exams. The Clinical Specialties Guide contains a study tools section that details many of the key resources across the Health Sciences, including media resources, a list of reference books, calculators, fast facts, and clinical practice guidelines. Listed in the guide is The Secrets Series, comprised of books containing question-and-answer content on numerous clinical specialties and topics. In our print collection, there are several physiology and anatomy-focused colouring books that can supplement your studying. These can be found by searching the Novanet catalogue for “colouring book” and narrowing the search to “DAL Health Science Library” using the filters on the left side of the screen, or by visiting us in-person at the Tupper Medical Building.

Acland’s Video Atlas and Anatomy.tv are both tools that can be useful for studying anatomy. Acland’s has 5 volumes of anatomy videos that feature real human cadavers, and an affiliated quiz for each volume. To access the quizzes, simply create a personal account using your Dalhousie email. Anatomy.tv has an extensive and interactive 3D atlas of the human body and a quiz with various settings for question types and difficulty. You can also download a variety of Health Mobile Apps, including Medscape, which contains simulations and quizzes.

Of particular interest to students in Medicine, you have access to BoardVitals, an effective medical exam review tool. After registering register with your Dalhousie email address, browse questions by clicking on “My Dashboard” on the top right-hand corner of the screen and select either USMLE Step 1, 2, or 3, or choose from specialized question banks in various specialties. Once you have selected your question bank, you can browse, start a quiz, and track your performance.

Access Medicine is another popular resource that also offers practice questions. With its Clinical Practice & Board Review questions and flashcards on multiple topics (found under the Study Tools dropdown menu), there are a variety of options to help with your studies. You can design custom questions based on Katzung & Trevor’s Pharmacology: Examination and Board Review, a key textbook in Pharmacology, among many other core texts. To do this, navigate to the book and locate “Go to Review Questions” under the title. From there, you can generate a random quiz, or build a custom version by selecting the number of questions you would like from various topics.

Bates’ Visual Guide and Jarvis Physical Assessment Video series can also support your studies, specifically in physical examination and assessment preparation, including for OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examinations). Finally, Mosby’s Video Series and Films on Demand will be of particular interest to those in nursing, as they contain useful nursing skill demonstrations.

No matter your program or year of study, we are here to support you in your learning and research endeavours. Don’t hesitate to contact us by email at kellogg@dal.ca, by telephone at (902) 717-5244, or by stopping into our locations in the Collaborative Health Education Building or the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building. Happy studying!

Research Summer Camp

April 12, 2023 dpryan Leave a Comment

Are you a graduate student, research assistant, or teaching assistant looking to develop your research skills? The Research Summer Camp is a comprehensive program that will take you through the research process from literature searching and writing all the way to publication. The program is open to any student, faculty, or staff member at Dalhousie, but is specifically tailored to graduate students.

The Research Summer Camp will be offered as a series of online modules on Brightspace and live online sessions. Modules may include short video lectures and interactive exercises to help you brush up on your literature searching, writing, information management, and research skills. By registering for this program, you will have access to all of the pre-recorded modules beginning on May 15th, 2023. You also have the option to register for sessions in the program that will be delivered live (online) in May and June.

Starting in May 2023, we are also offering certificates for completion of Research Summer Camp sessions and modules. For a full list of available certificates, see the Certificate page on the Research Summer Camp website.

Registration is open now, and access starts on May 15th, 2023. To self-register for the program

· Log into Brightspace

· In the Academic Support menu, select Self-registration

· From the list of courses, find and select Online Community – Research Camp 2023-2024

To register for live sessions, visit the Dal Libraries Events Calendar: https://dal.libcal.com/calendar/events

Program website, including schedule, module descriptions, FAQs: https://dal.ca.libguides.com/ResearchCamp

DMP Assistant Platform Upgrade

February 15, 2023 dpryan Leave a Comment

The DMP Assistant will be unavailable from 9am to 6pm AST on February 22nd, 2023 for a system upgrade.

Any work that DMP Assistant users have completed prior to the shutdown will be migrated to the new 3.1.0 platform, along with any other existing data management plans (DMPs), templates and user data. Users should save and/or export any existing DMPs/data that they may require during the shutdown period. Once launched, users will be able to access the DMP Assistant 3.1.0 service at the same URL (https://assistant.portagenetwork.ca/) with their existing credentials, and new users may create accounts as normal.

The upgraded version of the DMP Assistant will improve security and user experience, and come with several exciting new features, including a new “Research Output” tab that allows users to:

Specify the type (e.g., dataset, software, image, etc.), name and a description of the output, size (if applicable), whether or not it contains sensitive information, what the initial access level will be (e.g., open, restricted, closed), and the anticipated publication date
Select an appropriate license from the SPDX License List
Select any metadata standards that will be followed from the RDA Metadata standards catalog
Select the repositories they intend to preserve the object in from a dropdown list powered by re3data

For more information or any questions, please contact Shiloh Williams, Product Lead, Data Management Planning, Digital Research Alliance of Canada, at support@portagenetwork.ca.

Borealis Upgrade February 1st

January 24, 2023 dpryan Leave a Comment

Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, will be upgraded February 1. The platform, including Dalhousie Dataverse @ Borealis, will be unavailable from approximately 11 am – 5 pm Atlantic Time.

This upgrade should bring exciting new features, including:

New standardized Creative Commons licenses
Improved file upload handling and messaging
Accessibility improvements
Bug fixes
And more

To test these features, feel free to use their demo sandbox environment.

For more details reach out to the Borealis team with questions or feedback.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

December 21, 2022 dpryan Leave a Comment

At the end of 2022, Dalhousie University will no longer have access to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This tool is best known for the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). JCR is a subscription product, and its owner has arbitrarily decided to allow subscriptions only in combination with another of its pricey databases, Web of Science. Dalhousie ceased subscribing to Web of Science after internal review found the journal coverage was already available through other, more cost-effective subscriptions. Fortunately, while the JIF is widely recognized, it is not unique. Other products are available through Dal Libraries that serve much the same purpose.

First, what is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF)?

The JIF was developed in the 1960s as a tool to help decide what journals should be included in the new Science Citation Index. It was developed to help librarians see what journals researchers were consulting. It was not in itself meant to determine quality of those journals. The JIF is calculated by averaging the number of citations to the journal’s contents as a whole over a two-year period. Only citations found in journals indexed in the Web of Science database count. The JIF does not look at citation counts at the article level – a few highly cited articles can sway the average.

It is worth knowing that citation counts are often used as a proxy for quality or “impact” but authors might cite an article for a variety of reasons, so metrics based on citation counts do have limitations.

In addition, not every academic journal is included in JCR. Only about 12,000 journals have a JIF calculated in JCR – a small fraction of the number of peer-reviewed journals currently publishing.

What is the JIF used for?

To identify a potential publisher of my work

The JIF is often used to help identify journals in which authors might aspire to publish. There are several alternatives to this.

Scopus. Scopus has a metric called Citescore which is found by following the “Sources” tab on the Scopus homepage. CiteScore is a similar calculation to the JIF with two differences.
- The first is that it looks at the average number of citations over the previous four years instead of two.
- The second difference is that it considers citations found in journals indexed in Scopus instead of Web of Science. Because the two databases cover much the same content while Scopus is larger, citation counts tend to be a bit higher in Scopus.
The databases specific to your discipline. While Scopus is a general academic database with emphasis on the sciences, other databases can be used to identify appropriate outlets for your work. By searching for your research topic is a subject-specific database (such as MLA (Modern Language Association, or AGRICOLA) you can see where other researchers are publishing their work. This has the advantage of helping to ensure that your article will be findable to people in your field.

To check the integrity of a journal

The JIF can also be used to determine whether a journal is “predatory”. Journals that lack integrity often advertise that they have various “Impact Factors” as a way to deceive authors. A quick way to check the veracity of these claims is by going to the recognized source – JCR. However, that is by no means the only way a journal can or should be assessed. Checking to see if the journal in question is indexed (included) in databases such as Scopus, Academic Search Premier, and the databases commonly used in your field is a way to not only see if a journal is possibly trustworthy, but also if publishing there will ensure the accessibility of your work. For more information, see https://dal.ca.libguides.com/c.php?g=257122&p=2830098

To assess the quality of research

Unfortunately, the JIF is often used to access the quality of the work of individual researchers. We say unfortunately, because this is not an appropriate use of this metric. As the very first statement of the internationally recognized San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) says, “1. Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” This is because the many limitations of citations as a proxy for quality, combined with the limitations of journal level metrics do not provide reliable insights into the value of work at the individual level.

Please contact one of Dal Libraries if you have questions about using Scopus or other subject specific databases to help you select a journal to publish in, look up a CiteScore, or have general questions about our resources.

W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library
902-717-5244
kellogg@dal.ca

Killam Memorial Library (Arts & Social Sciences, Computer Science, Management, Sciences)
902-494-3611
killmref@dal.ca

MacRae Library (Agriculture)
902-893-6669
macrae.library@dal.ca

Sexton Design & Technology Library (Architecture & Planning, Engineering)
902-494-3240
sexton.library@dal.ca

Law Library
902-494-2124
lawref@dal.ca

Category: General Library News