bims-librar Biomed News
on Biomedical librarianship
Issue of 2023‒01‒29
nine papers selected by
Thomas Krichel
Open Library Society


  1. Front Psychol. 2022 ;13 987180
      To confront college students' new reading patterns and the continuous decline in academic library borrowing rates, we conducted empirical research on promoting multisensory reading as a way to attract students' attention, and to stimulate interest in, and promote the practice of, reading through a library program called "Reading Today Listening Everyday" (RTLE) on a library's WeChat public account. The program involved 48 librarians and 105 students who were recruited into different groups to co-create, edit and release multisensory tweets every workday. Multisensory contents including text-based content, audio-based content and emotional resonance were presented to evoke readers' visual, audio, and emotional senses to induce more reading practice. Using the Context, Input, Process and Product (CIPP) evaluation method, the multisensory presentation in RTLE program was proven to be effective in promoting library reading with a high number of tweeted page views and an increased borrowing rate for recommended books. In 2020, 269 issues accompanied by 269 audio frequencies garnered 80,268 page views, depending on the caliber of the reading promoter out of the 48 librarians and 52 student anchors behind it. The 484 RTLE-recommended books were borrowed 113 times in 2020, which was a rate 1.46 times higher than in 2019 (77 times). The analysis of the relationship between tweet views and borrowing rates for recommended books indicates that more page views indicate greater reader interest, leading to increased borrowing. From readers' feedback and comments, the gain afforded by multisensory reading can improve higher-level reading trends such as the number of reading interests, enjoyment, engagement, etc.
    Keywords:  academic library; audio; emotional; multisensory reading; reading promotion; visual
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.987180
  2. Comput Biol Med. 2023 Jan 23. pii: S0010-4825(23)00046-X. [Epub ahead of print]154 106581
      This paper presents a new corpus of radiology medical reports written in Spanish and labeled with ICD-10. CARES (Corpus of Anonymised Radiological Evidences in Spanish) is a high-quality corpus manually labeled and reviewed by radiologists that is freely available for the research community on HuggingFace. These types of resources are essential for developing automatic text classification tools as they are necessary for training and tuning computational systems. However, in the medical domain these are very difficult to obtain for different reasons including privacy and data protection issues or the involvement of medical specialists in the generation of these resources. We present a corpus labeled and reviewed by radiologists in their daily practice that is available for research purposes. In addition, after describing the corpus and explaining how it has been generated, a first experimental approach is carried out using several machine learning algorithms based on transformer language models such as BioBERT and RoBERTa to test the validity of this linguistic resource. The best performing classifier achieved 0.8676 micro and 0.8328 macro f1-score and these results encourage us to continue working in this research line.
    Keywords:  Biomedical natural language processing; ICD-10; Medical corpus; Radiology report; Spanish medical resource; Text classification; Transformer language model
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.106581
  3. Bioinform Adv. 2022 ;2(1): vbac034
      Summary: Gilda is a software tool and web service that implements a scored string matching algorithm for names and synonyms across entries in biomedical ontologies covering genes, proteins (and their families and complexes), small molecules, biological processes and diseases. Gilda integrates machine-learned disambiguation models to choose between ambiguous strings given relevant surrounding text as context, and supports species-prioritization in case of ambiguity.Availability and implementation: The Gilda web service is available at http://grounding.indra.bio with source code, documentation and tutorials available via https://github.com/indralab/gilda.
    Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbac034
  4. Hawaii J Health Soc Welf. 2023 Jan;82(1): 3-9
      This study explored how undergraduate students at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa sought and consumed information about the virus that causes COVID-19. This study also examined student perceptions of the severity of and their susceptibility to the virus and their main concerns about it. Four hundred fifty-six students completed online surveys between October and early December of 2020 and 2021. Students reported low to moderate levels of information seeking across four domains: (1) knowledge about COVID-19 and its symptoms; (2) preventing the spread of the virus; (3) the current state of the pandemic in Hawai'i; and (4) the likely future of the pandemic in Hawai'i. Overall, websites, television, and Instagram were the top 3 channels used by students to seek information for these domains. Students reported primarily paying attention to information from government and news organizations as sources. However, students' preferred channels and sources varied with the type of information they sought. Students also reported believing that COVID-19 is severe and that they are susceptible to being infected with it. The more time students reported seeking information, the greater their perceptions of COVID-19's severity across all domains. Students' primary concerns about COVID-19 centered on state regulations/policies, vaccines, tourism/travel, the economy, and pandemic/post-pandemic life. These findings can help public health practitioners in Hawai'i determine how best to reach an undergraduate student population with information related to COVID-19.
    Keywords:  COVID-19; University of Hawai‘i; communication channel; communication source; information seeking; undergraduates
  5. Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2023 Jan;11(1): e4787
      Breast augmentation is one of the most frequently performed aesthetic procedures in the United States. Online information is often used by patients to make decisions when undergoing cosmetic procedures. It is vital that online medical information includes relevant decision-making factors and uses language that is understandable to broad patient audiences. Ideally, online resources should aid patient decisions in aesthetic surgical planning, especially implant size selection for breast augmentation. We describe patient decision-making factors and readability of breast implant size selection recommended by private practice plastic surgery webpages.Methods: Using a depersonalized, anonymous query to Google search engine, the terms "breast implant size factors" and "breast implant size decision" were searched, and 52 plastic surgery private practice webpages were identified. Webpages were analyzed for reported decision-making factors of implant size selection. Readability analyses of webpages were performed with Readability Studio and Hemingway Editor.
    Results: The two major decision-making factors for implant size selection reported by webpages were body/tissue-based measurements and surgeon input. Ten factors related to patient lifestyle, surgical goals, and procedural options were also identified. Average webpage scores for five readability measures exceeded recommended levels for medical information.
    Conclusions: Reported decision-making factors for implant size selection emphasize a plastic surgeon's expertise but may enhance the patient's role in preoperative planning. Webpages describing breast implant size selection exceed the sixth and eighth grade reading levels recommended by the AMA and NIH, respectively. Improving the readability of webpages will refine the role of online medical information in preoperative planning of breast augmentation.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1097/GOX.0000000000004787
  6. Medicine (Baltimore). 2023 Jan 20. 102(3): e32685
      The aim of this research is to evaluate the websites containing "coccydynia, coccyx trauma or fracture" in terms of readability, reliability, accuracy, and quality. Searches for "coccydynia, coccyx trauma, coccyx fracture" were carried out in the 3 most used search engines in the USA: Google, Yahoo, and Bing in February 2022. A total of 141 websites were rated by 2 different neurosurgeons for the "Global Quality Score" and "Alexa Popularity Rank." 97.2% of the sites examined include the definition of the disease, 66% include the importance of the disease, 92.9% include the symptoms of the disease, 88.7% include the treatment of the disease, 78% include the signs of the disease, 77.3% include the mechanism of the disease It has been determined that the websites examined within the scope of the research have high global quality score (GQS) and APR and are enriched with images to a large extent.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1097/MD.0000000000032685
  7. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol. 2023 Jan 20. pii: S0301-2115(23)00028-3. [Epub ahead of print]282 83-88
      INTRODUCTION: The Internet and electronic devices with Internet access allow for a greater fluidity of information and speed of communication, especially in the field of health. Abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) affects approximately 3-30% of women and can negatively impact their health and quality of life. Information regarding AUB that is available on the Internet may not be clear or accurate, rendering it difficult to understand and likely to result in delayed medical evaluation, which subsequently leads to worsening of the AUB.OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the quality of the information regarding AUB currently available on the Internet, including information regarding treatments.
    METHODS: The Google Trends website was searched for the most widely used English terms related to AUB. The identified descriptors were searched individually on the Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines. The first 10 results of each search were pre-selected and evaluated for inclusion in this study. Selected websites were categorically divided into two groups (news/magazine and academic) and individually analyzed by three experts using the DISCERN quality criteria (reliability, general quality, and quality of information) and the presence or absence of the Health on the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode®) seal.
    RESULTS: Of the 168 websites included in this study, 60.1% were allocated to the news/magazine group and 39.9% were allocated to the academic group. Over half of the websites (54.2%) did not have the HONcode® quality seal. Websites in the academic group were more likely to include accurate information regarding AUB with greater reliability than websites in the news/magazine group. There were no statistical differences regarding the general quality of the websites. Most websites were rated as either moderate quality (70.8%) or low quality (28.6%). The HONcode® criterion was found to be a confounding factor of the analyses, as the grouping and quality results of websites without this seal were significantly associated. In addition, websites in the news/magazines group were 6.7 times more likely to provide low quality information than websites in the academic group (odds ratio: 6.7; 95% confidence interval: 2.1-21.4).
    CONCLUSION: The information regarding AUB that is available on the Internet is of low to moderate quality. Academic websites present more reliable information of greater quality. The presence of the HONcode® seal is considered important to determine the quality of the content of a website, especially for news/magazine websites, and may help Internet users identify websites that contain more reliable information. Algorithms and applications that categorize the quality of information and the reliability of health content may be useful tools that can help patients clarify their symptoms for several conditions including AUB.
    Keywords:  Abnormal uterine bleeding; DISCERN; HONcode®; Health information systems; Internet; Medical informatics; Websites
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejogrb.2023.01.020
  8. Otol Neurotol. 2023 Jan 30.
      INTRODUCTION: Cholesteatoma is common chronic ear condition that usually requires surgical treatment and long-term follow-up. The Internet helps patients find information about their medical conditions and assists in shared clinical decision making. This work aims to assess the quality of information on YouTube for cholesteatoma. We aim to assess the quality of the most popular cholesteatoma videos on YouTube using recognized scoring systems and determine if quality correlated with video likes and views.METHODS: The YouTube website was systematically searched on separate days with a formal search strategy to identify videos relevant to cholesteatoma. Each video was viewed and scored by three independent assessors using a novel Essential and Ideal Video Completeness criteria for cholesteatoma and the validated DISCERN tool. Popularity metrics were analyzed and compared with video popularity.
    RESULTS: A total of 90 YouTube videos were analyzed with an average 55,292 views per video with an average of 271 likes and 22 dislikes. The interrater correlation was moderate with Fleiss kappa score 0.42 (p < 0.01) using the Essential and Ideal Video Completeness criteria for cholesteatoma and interrater correlation coefficient was 0.78 (95% confidence interval, 0.58-0.90), indicating good reliability for DISCERN scores. The overall video quality was poor with higher DISCERN scores found from academic institutions.
    CONCLUSION: YouTube content with regard to cholesteatoma is of poor quality. Videos with unclassified sources or more dislikes correlated with poor quality. Otology societies should be encouraged to publish high-quality YouTube videos on cholesteatoma and other ear conditions.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1097/MAO.0000000000003824
  9. Front Public Health. 2022 ;10 1068582
      Background: Despite the increasing recognition of the public health value of social media platforms, TikTok short videos focusing on adolescent vision health have not received much attention. We aimed to evaluate the content, sources, and information quality of myopia-related videos on TikTok.Methods: The top 200 most-liked myopia-related videos on the Chinese version of TikTok were queried and screened on March 12, 2022. The descriptive characteristics, contents, and sources of the selected 168 videos were obtained, and their overall quality, reliability, understandability, and actionability were assessed using the validated scoring instruments DISCERN and PEMAT-A/V.
    Results: Medical professionals were the main source (45.8%, 77/168) of videos. Misinformation (10.1%, 17/168) was mainly attributable to for-profit organizations (20%, 3/15) and individual non-medical users (31.3%, 10/32). However, their videos enjoyed the highest numbers of "likes," "comments," and "shares" (P < 0.05). The mean reliability and overall quality regarding treatment choice were (2.5 ± 0.5) and (3.1 ± 0.9), respectively. Videos on TikTok showed relatively high understandability (84.7%) and moderate actionability (74.9%). Video producers tended to partly or fully provide information regarding management (81.5%, 137/168) and outcome (82.1%, 138/168), and to ignore or only slightly mention content related to definition (86.9%, 146/169) and signs (82.1%, 138/168). The five video sources showed significant differences in the prevalence of misleading information (P < 0.001), publication reliability (P < 0.001), overall quality (P = 0.039), content score (P = 0.019), and understandability (P = 0.024).
    Conclusion: Considering the moderate-to-poor reliability and variable quality across video sources, the substantial myopia-related content on TikTok should be treated with caution. Nevertheless, TikTok videos may serve as a surrogate or supplement for information dissemination if providers can ensure more comprehensive and accurate content.
    Keywords:  TikTok; information quality; misinformation; myopia; public health; social media
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.1068582