Literature search tips: HDAS de duping

This week's literature search tip comes from our Clinical Librarian, Sarah Sutton:

As the HDAS de duping isn’t working, you can either export your search results into reference management software and then dedupe in that (with the drawback that it takes out most of the nice links to full text etc that HDAS includes). Or my plan b. You copy your results onto the HDAS clipboard, then sort it by title (clipboard still lets you do that) and then whiz down the list selecting any duplicates and then remove them by clicking remove from clipboard. Make sure you set the results to not show the abstracts and to have 50 results per page, to make this a bit less appallingly boring at least. I don’t mind doing this for 250 results but more than that would involve me being very devoted to the clinician in question.

We hope you like today's tip! Stay tuned for more and please do share your thoughts in the comments field below or on our Twitter page. Catch up on all our literature search tips here.

A day in the life of a clinical librarian

Hello and welcome to 'A day in the life of a clinical librarian' blog series. This is a monthly series sharing what a day at work for those working in clinical librarianship actually looks like and finding out about the person behind the job.


This month we're interviewing our Clinical Librarian Services Manager.

Who are you and where do you work?

I’m Pip Divall and I work as the Clinical Librarian Service Manager at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. I’m mainly based at the Glenfield Hospital Library, but I work across all three hospital sites in Leicester. I manage the team of Clinical Librarians and CISS Officers, as well as providing a service to my dedicated clinical teams.

How long have you been there?

I started as a Clinical Librarian at UHL in October 2004, but had been in a clinical librarian role at George Eliot Hospital for 7 months prior to taking up the post in Leicester. Before that, my first professional role was an Assistant Librarian in a mental health trust in Staffordshire.

What attracted you to Clinical Librarianship?

I first learned of Clinical Librarianship while I was writing my MA dissertation at Loughborough University. A friend was doing her project on the topic and it sounded like a really exciting and inspiring job to do. I didn’t really think much more of it until it came to applying for jobs when the course ended, and I was lucky enough to find myself in the NHS and found that I really enjoyed enquiry work and literature searching. I realised later I’d been doing Clinical Librarianship-lite anyway, as I always sent a summary of my results along with the actual results. 

What does an average day at work involve?

An average day involves meeting with clinicians, either for training or project work. I’m involved in several systematic reviews for the orthopaedic team at the moment. As I manage the team, there are often one-to-ones and working on “managery” things. I’m now on the Knowledge for Healthcare Workforce Development Working Group, so that adds to the “managery” thinking.  I’m also heavily involved with the training programme for the library and education department. I’m really enjoying the use of games to teach information literacy at the moment. Most days I’ll be squeezing in a literature search! 

If you weren’t a Librarian, what would you be?

I’m fascinated by perfumes, so if I weren’t a librarian, I would love to be a perfumer.

Tell us a joke or a non-work fact about yourself

You can have both:

I was once on an episode of Bargain Hunt.

I do a great line in cheese related humour:

What kind of cheese do you use to hide a horse?

Mascarpone.

Recently published evidence updates

The following Evidence Updates have recently been published, detailing the latest evidence and literature.

Breast Cancer
Cardiac Surgery
Children's Health
Colorectal Surgery
Corporate Nursing
Emergency Medicine
Infection Control
Musculoskeletal
Older People's Health
Palliative Care
Renal Services
Respiratory Medicine
Urology
Vascular Surgery

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter to find out when an evidence update is hot off the press!

EAHIL+ICAHIS+ICLC Report, 10-12th June 2015 Edinburgh

Wednesday 10th June 

ICLC 

Our conference was held on the morning before EAHIL proper started, in one of the lecture theatres in Appleton Tower, which was the main base for the Workshop. 

See here for links to presentations - https://eahil2015.wordpress.com/iclc-session/ 

*** Main take home messages – if you are running a conference elsewhere make sure that everything is working from a IT/technical point of view and ensure all PPTs are loaded to the system before you start.***

EAHIL Workshop

It started with a plenary from Professor Hazel Hall on the topic of introducing a research-minded approach to professional practice.  She discussed the DREaM project which aimed to develop a formal UK-wide network of Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers. See here for link to her presentation - http://www.slideshare.net/HazelHall/incorporating-a-researchminded-approach-to-professional-practice.  She then formally declared that EAHIL 2015 Workshop was open by ringing a bell.

I then attended a workshop session ran by Margaret J. Foster entitled Introduction to systematic reviews and the role of the librarian.  This was a really useful and inspiring session and she talked in great depth about her work supporting researchers with systematic reviews. There wasn’t all that much hands on work and we ran out of time, but she gave us quite a good overview of her SR methods and how she works with researchers.

See link to her slides here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ymm48glouvdf98h/AADLetMMEKdah7RCqDlK8s1Za?dl=0# 

The day ended with the welcome reception (cheese, biscuits and prosecco) held in the beautiful Playfair Library Hall of Old College, University of Edinburgh.  We heard a number of speeches from various colleagues of the organisers, and felt warmly welcomed to a very sunny Edinburgh.  

Thursday 11th June

The second day began with plenary talks from Dr Alison Brettle and Dr Johanna Rivano Eckerdal, who both discussed research methods.

The first workshop I attended was on Social network analysis – what, where and how? Louise Cooke from Loughborough University ran the session which I found really interesting.  She talked about how networks exist and form within groups and gave details of free software that you can download to play around with analysing networks.

Link to slides here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/orlwb6f2ebit1f8/AACLMGkqkrWgnWGWu0MRY49Va?dl=0

I then went to the Using action research in practice workshop ran by Hannah Spring. What she described seemed a bit like reflection, but more formal.  They discussed it in terms of making sense of your own practice to gain a deeper understanding and justification of what you are doing.

Slides here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6mnt2xlurakei0j/AADY-_kAZ-IeVRVudoIt7fZRa?dl=0 

The afternoon was taken up with the session on Sharing literature search blocks: help develop a cooperative solution.  I’m not sure how much I really got out of this. It did raise an interesting question though in terms of whether we as a team should or could save some search blocks on some of our regular topics.

Link to slides here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2gvl3okbaltadwy/AAC1GPHaR5vM1SDj0ZImlT3Aa?dl=0

The Gala dinner was held in the evening at the National Museum of Scotland. It was a lovely meal and then a ceilidh, which I managed to avoid getting involved in thankfully.

Friday 12th June 

The last workshop session I attended was run by an external company called Seeing Stones, headed up by Iain Davison on Communicating with hard to reach audiences.  This was really useful, very interactive and I could really relate it to my everyday work in terms of communicating with non-traditional library users. It touched on finding out what your core values are as a first point of call, as when you know what you believe in decisions become a lot easier. 

Link to slides here - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y6yjvxwvy4c1gic/AAAu1PSOcOSYMK3urWU5p_oWa?dl=0 

Other useful links:

• JEAHIL – Memories from Edinburgh issue -  http://eahil.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/journal-3-2015-link-web1.pdf 

• EAHIL Workshop website with presentations to download - https://eahil2015.wordpress.com/workshop-presentations-for-download/ 

Handy website by the US National Cancer Institute

Check out this very handy website prepared by the US National Cancer Institute. It has information for patients and professionals. Only thing to look out for is that it shows you only one section of each article at a time, so don’t think “oh that’s a bit brief”, there is a navigation list on the left of each article and you can go on to the next section by clicking that or by clicking on an arrow at the bottom of the page. Here is the section on Palliative or supportive care:

http://www.cancer.gov/publications/pdq/information-summaries/supportive-care