The Special Libraries Association’s BioMedical & Life Sciences Division conducted a poll to identify the 100 most influential journals of biology & medicine over the last 100 years.” The poll was conducted by selection panels for three areas: clinical medicine & allied health sciences, molecular and cellular biology (including journals of biotechnology), and natural history.
The top ten are listed here.
Clinical medicine & allied health sciences:
- The New England Journal of Medicine
- JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
- BMJ: The British Medical Journal (which beat out The Lancet by two votes)
Molecular, cellular, and general science:
- Science
- Nature
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Natural history (Botany, Zoology, Anthropology and Paleontology):
- The American Journal of Botany
- The Journal of Zoology
- The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (which finished in a three-way tie with the Journal of Human Evolution, and the American Journal of Human Biology, but then won according to tie-breaking rules on grounds of longevity)
- The Journal of Paleontology
All of the top ten titles except for The American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the current year’s content of The Journal of Zoology are available to UWW students and staff, either through online databases or in Andersen Library’s first-floor periodicals collection.
Fixing Sex:
Intersex, Medical Authority and Lived Experience
By Katrina Karkazis
JK1764 .H56 2009
New Book Island, 2nd floor
Raise your hand if you’re heard of cystic fibrosis. That’s probably most, if not all, of you. Now, raise your hand if you’re heard of intersex (bonus points if you’re heard of disorders of sex development). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a significantly less number of you know about the latter. But can you guess which is more common? This week’s featured book explains much more about this sensitive, yet virtually unknown, topic.
Karkazis, a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University, takes a look at intersexuality and the current debate regarding its diagnosis and treatment, as well as the societal issue of gender. The author provides a history of how the medical condition(s) have been treated in the past, when it was referred to as hermaphroditism, and the controversy that has surrounded those procedures. Karkazis delves deeper than just the medical dispute and gives it a human face with interviews from intersexed individuals and their parents, as well as physicians. The writer does an excellent job making an accessible and thoughtful volume on this complex and contested issue.
As the King of Pop would say, “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.”
There’s a lot of health information online. Unfortunately, it’s not all accurate. If you haven’t checked out the consumer health Web site MedlinePlus sponsored by the National Library of Medicine, you should. It’s terrific. MedlinePlus has up-to-date health information with every topic being reviewed by health professionals at least every 6-months for accuracy. The drug information is very extensive, and new drugs are being added all the time. A quick search in the search box will yield results from pre-evaluated health Web sites. It’s much better than using Google and then taking your chances on accuracy.
Some other great health Web sites for health information include: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), MayoClinic.com, Lab Tests Online, and FamilyDoctor.org.
If you need health information beyond what the consumer health Web sites contain, the library has a list of Medicine Databases. You might also want to search the library catalog for books and government documents on health topics. Because health information changes over time, use the “Quick Limit” to search for materials published since 2005.
The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!
Hooked:
Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry
by Howard Brody
R724 .B76 2007
New Book Island, 2nd floor
Have you ever wondered why doctors prescribe some medications over another, even if they claim to have the same effect? This week’s featured book takes a look at the medical profession and its interactions with the pharmaceutical industry. The book’s introduction uses an interesting metaphor to describe the behavior of medical professionals. The author, professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, likens their situation to being in a stage production. The general public views doctors while they are ‘on stage’ and do not see their behind-the-scenes dealings with the pharmaceutical industry ‘back stage.’ Brody contends that what the public doesn’t see may actually hurt them. This book delves into each aspect of the doctor-pharma relationship, such as the quality of pharmaceutical research, the suppression of research findings and the role of drug sales representatives. He then looks to offer solutions to correct the corruption between the two. If you’re looking for a complete view of the medical profession operates with respect to drug companies, then this book’s for you.
The Public Library of Science is a non-profit site for keeping up with and freely sharing scientific and medical research. It is dedicated to open access to research articles, and also offers blogs, journal content alerts, and open access (no-fee) peer-reviewed journals in which researchers may publish their research. It could be a good place for students casting about for topics for research papers if they are interested in the sciences.
The site, less than 10 years old, recently added its 1,500th paper. Topics of recent articles include: Chimpanzee Autarky (Do chimps barter?) and Human and Chimpanzee Gene Expression Differences Replicated in Mice Fed Different Diets (Do mice eating different diets–human cafeteria food, McDonald’s fast food, mouse pellets, or lab chimp food–exhibit different gene expression?).
Recent blog topics include No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (or Gift or Sample), referring to the PLoS Medicine journal item The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States which argues that “the staggering amounts spent by drug companies on marketing” are not justified by their innovation in drug development, and Broiler Chicken Welfare Definitely Isn’t Pukka which discusses concerns about broiler chickens and the conditions in which they are raised.
PLoS encourages researchers to publish in its open access journals for maximum impact (since the articles are freely available all over the world), but there is a cost. UW-Madison is an institutional member of PLoS (see articles UW-Madison researchers have submitted since 2005).
How do you expand your publishing business and make more money? Most would not respond by giving away your product for free, but that’s just what Reed Elsevier is going to do. They’ve decided to go out on a limb and offer the latest articles and research from 100 of their top medical journals for free. Oncology by OncologyStat targets doctors and other practitioners to register to receive access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of content. Like other free web services, like Facebook or MySpace, they’re looking to survive and profit from advertising sold for the site as well as selling user information.
Why does this matter? It’s huge because it is shifting costs from the institutions and professionals that need that information to perform their critical work to the advertisers that want to sell them stuff. Furthermore, it’s an opportunity for others to get a hold of cutting edge research (if they can sift through the medical jargon).
Now you may be familiar with Elsevier, as we subscribe to ScienceDirect College Edition (
). You already have access to over four years worth of content from more than 1800 journals, which means you probably don’t need to sign up for the website.
original story reported in the New York Times
