Biblioblast December 2024: Library News

• From the Director
• Staff News
• Library Fest 2024 Recap
• Upgrading Remote (Off-Campus) Access to Library Resources: Volunteers Needed!
• Rainforth’s Stereoscopic Skin Clinic – Exploring the 1910s Version of VisualDx
• Resource Spotlight: JoVE Core Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics Now Available
• Scite and NEJM AI - Trial Access through December 15
• New Books
• Classes & Events

From the Director

In April, we celebrated the D. Samuel Gottesman Library’s 65^th anniversary with an exhibit looking back at the past and looking forward to our next 65 years.

In May, the physical library closed for a 3-month renovation, but our staff remained very busy supporting our students, postdocs, faculty, and staff. In addition to our regular services, librarians brought the library to you with our popups in various buildings around campus.

We were thrilled to welcome new and returning students into our new space in August.

I am particularly proud of our Library Fest, held in October. This annual event is a celebration of the library and its resources, and it was a great success this year. We look forward to seeing you at our next Library Fest in October 2025.

The library is currently offering free trials of two new resources:

·      Scite, a citation database that uses AI to provide context for scientific citations, classifying them as supporting, mentioning, or contrasting, to help researchers evaluate the reliability and relevance of scholarly articles

·      NEJM AI, a new journal from the publishers of The New England Journal of Medicine, which explores the use of artificial intelligence in clinical medicine

Both trials run through December 15. Please give them a try and let us know if we should add them to our collection. We value your feedback.

As we approach the holiday season, the library extends warm wishes for a joyful season.

As always, the library is open 24/7 via card swipe. The Beren Study Center is open 24/7. The library’s eJournals, eBooks, and databases are also available to you 24/7 whereever you are. Please check our website for updates to our service hours during the holidays.

As we approach the new year, I would like to reaffirm our commitment to delivering exceptional library services and ensuring you have access to the resources necessary for your success.

Thank you to all those who participated in our raffle. We had an unprecedented number of entries and our lucky winners took home items that ranged from an Amazon Fire tablet and wireless headsets to free textbooks and gift cards, as well as some of our bespoke Einstein socks.

We hope that you will join us next fall for the event’s 2025 edition!

The cards were designed to be used with a special viewer, called a stereoscope, to make the pictures seem to be in 3-D. The stereoscope took advantage of the way each eye sees just a little bit differently because of interpupillary distance – to produce what, in those days, must have been a pretty neat effect.

Dermatology was not the first medical field to exploit stereoscopy for the benefit of education – that distinction belongs to radiology – but its potential for studying skin diseases was obvious to Selden Irwin Rainforth, who created the Stereoscopic Skin Clinic. Originally, he sold the cards together with a stereoscope to facilitate easy viewing.¹

The Skin Clinic gives us a rare window into what doctors were treating nearly 115 years ago. Syphilis is a major component, cropping up in dozens of cards, but more familiar – and still very contemporary conditions – like vitiligo, scleroderma, eczema, and psoriasis also appear. In addition, the cards give us insight into the way medical practitioners of that era approached these diseases and therefore how practice both has and has not changed in the intervening century. And, finally, they are a reminder that technologies – whether stereoscopic cards or online resources or, indeed, AI tools – come and go but the needs of students and physicians remain very much the same.

^1 Kantor J. Stereoscopic Cards in Early 20th Century Dermatologic Education. JAMA Dermatol. 2016;152(4):374. doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2015.3207.

You may already be familiar with JoVE, which offers a wide range of journals and video content, spanning the basic sciences, biomedical sciences and clinical medicine, and now it has one more great resource. 

JoVE Core Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics is a comprehensive collection, released in October and available to the Einstein/Montefiore community through our subscription, which delves into the essential concepts underlying pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, illuminating the principles behind drug movement, absorption, and response mechanisms.

The initial release comprises 51 animated videos, which take viewers through subjects like drug absorption, pharmacokinetic modeling, and biostatistics. These lessons provide a thorough understanding of how drugs interact within the human body, from the cellular level to systemic effects. They also explore the influence of biostatistical analysis on pharmacokinetics, covering critical topics such as data variability, hypothesis testing, and statistical inference.

The videos encompass three major chapters that cover crucial topics, including:

•       Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics: Introduction. In-depth cover of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination, along with how drugs produce effects and interact with receptors.
•       Biostatistics: Introduction. Essential statistical concepts, including data variability, hypothesis testing, and parametric versus nonparametric data, providing a solid foundation for analyzing pharmacokinetic data.
•       Pharmacokinetics: Drug Absorption. Detailed insights into various drug delivery routes, transport mechanisms, and factors influencing drug absorption, from cellular membranes to physiological influences.

This JoVE collection is ideal for medical students and faculty, as well as those in pharmacology and related fields, and the content will continue to expand in the upcoming months.



Curious about other topics that you can learn about through JoVE? Then check out all the videos and other resources that we have available at Einstein/Montefiore, which run the gamut from clinical skills to psychology to physics.

Scite

Scite is an AI-powered research platform that analyzes and provides citation context for scientific papers, helping researchers evaluate the credibility and impact of scholarly articles.

• Researchers can check Smart Citation metrics at the level of articles, journals, organizations, and funders.

• Students can ask research questions in plain language and get answers directly from the full text of research articles.

A browser extension enables users to see Smart Citations anywhere they are reading a scientific article online. Let us know what you think, please fill out our brief Scite evaluation form.

NEJM AI

In January 2024, the NEJM Group began publishing a new journal, NEJM AI. In the journal’s inaugural issue, the editors describe NEJM AI as, “... a platform aimed at informing readers and guiding the responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the quality of health care.”

NEJM AI is not yet indexed for MEDLINE. Citations for articles where the manuscript was deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with public access policies do appear in PubMed.

Examples of recent articles include:

Ouyang, David, Hogan, Joseph. We Need More Randomized Clinical Trials of AI. NEJM AI. 2024;1(11) doi:10.1056/AIe2400881.

Aronson, Samuel, Machini, Kalotina, Shin, Jiyeon, et al. GPT-4 Performance, Nondeterminism, and Drift in Genetic Literature Review. NEJM AI. 2024;1(9) doi:10.1056/AIcs2400245.

Fajtl, Jiri, Welikala, Roshan, Barman, Sarah, et al. Trustworthy Evaluation of Clinical AI for Analysis of Medical Images in Diverse Populations. NEJM AI. 2024;1(9) doi:10.1056/AIoa2400353.

Lin, Chin, Liu, Wei-Ting, Chang, Chiao-Hsiang, et al. Artificial Intelligence-Powered Rapid Identification of ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction via Electrocardiogram (ARISE) - A Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trial. NEJM AI. 2024;1(7) doi:10.1056/AIoa2400190.

Please email askref@einsteinmed.edu if you think the library should subscribe to NEJM AI or if you have any questions. If you have recommendations of other resources you think the library should add it its collection, please fill out the recommendation form on our website.

Achieving equity in neurological practice: principles and pathways / Bruce Ovbiagele, Sharon Lewis, Daniel José Correa, Reena Thomas, Larry CharlestonIV, editors. Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2024.

Congratulations to Daniel J. Correa, MD, MS, for the release of his new publication. 

Current diagnosis & treatment: psychiatry, 4th ed. / edited by Michael H. Ebert, Peter R. Martin, Molly McVoy, Robert J. Ronis, Sidney H. Weissman. New York: McGraw-Hill Medical, 2025.

Principles of planning, evaluation, and research for health care programs, 2nd ed. / Karen Marie Perrin. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2021.

W 84.3 P458p 2021 - Einstein Reading Room

Tech agnostic: how technology became the world's most powerful religion, and why it desperately needs a reformation / Greg M. Epstein. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2024.



Research methodology in the health sciences: a quick reference guide / Prasanta K. Bhattacharya. New York: McGraw Hill, 2021.

W 20.5 B575r 2021 - Einstein Reading Room

View the full calendar or click on a class title to sign up. Contact a Research Librarian to learn more, or to schedule your own personal or small-group session.