Category Archives: Cardiac Electrophysiology

Cardiac Electrophysiology

Research and Reference Management: Part The Second

Yesterday I posted a flow chart and a description of the first half of the process that it diagrams. Today, I’ll explain the more elaborate second half. First, for convenience, here’s the flowchart again:

The first part of the process gives me a prioritized list of articles to read. It helps, when I have time to read articles, if I can simply go to the list, get a few PDFs, print them, and read them. Therefore I typically go down the list and acquire PDFs for tens of articles in one go. That’s covered in the diagram. For each item on Cite-U-Like, there’s a link to PubMed. The important thing about that is that on PubMed, (while I’m on the University’s network) there are big icon-button things indicating whether I have full-text access to the article, and where. If I have full-text access, I follow the link and download the PDF. I then upload it to Cite-U-Like, which does three things for me.

  1. It keeps the file online for universal access (for me only)
  2. It renames the file to something sensible for me
  3. It puts the file in a nicely organized system with the rest of my article information

If, however, the article is not available to me in full-text (some institutions have more extensive access than others… *cough*), then I have to follow the “no” branch of the flow chart. First, I check the library’s online catalog to make sure that the library does not have the issue in question. They might have it. Ironically, they seem to have extremely obscure journals, but none of the really relevant ones. At least in my field. They also might have the article in J-STOR or Ovid or something like that. If so, then it’s time to descend into confusing multiple-electronic-database hell. I left that off the flowchart.

Anyway, so, the more likely case is that they don’t have it at all. That’s actually a relatively painless scenario, and it’s getting better. Most universities, including mine, have a nice online interface to request photocopies of articles via Inter-Library Loan (ILL). You request your article, and in a day to several days it arrives. Historically, the article would arrive in the form of a mailed or faxed photocopy. This was sometimes inconvenient. Why?

  1. You have to go pick up the article. If you’re doing this several times a week it can get pretty time consuming and annoying.
  2. The article is not digital. If you want to take the copy with you somewhere, you need to lug the dead trees. It is possible to scan the article using an auto-document feeder on a nice digital copy machine. This is yet another step, though.
  3. Sometimes they do a really bad job of copying
  4. Color figures usually become something between mostly useless and entirely useless after being xeroxed, especially if it’s not done with a careful eye for darkness settings.

The new thing is that most articles are delivered electronically. You get an email saying, “your article is in!”, you go to the ILL site and download however many arrived-articles have piled up, and you’re good to go. Of course, the issues of bad copying still apply, since nobody seems to use color scanning.

As you can see from the flowchart, no matter how the articles arrive, you can make them into PDFs somehow, and get them back into the Cite-U-Like library. From there, you can download the PDFs in order on the prioritized To Read list, and churn through them.

How to properly read and make use of the knowledge you gain from reading is worthy of several other blog posts. Questions?

Daily Work Log 2006-07-12

In an effort to increase my blogging, I’m going to start making daily logs before I leave work.

I spent most of today reading journal articles to prep for writing the discussion and introduction of my paper. The methods and results have been coalescing for a while, and I think are nearing completion. I received some helpful comments from my coauthor via trans-Atlantic fax this morning, and addressing those comments is next on the agenda for that project.

In other news, I’ve begun work on my prospectus. It needs to be defended before I leave for Baltimore, and that doesn’t give me very long. Luckily a lot of the groundwork has already been done for other reasons, so it should be mostly synthesis. The department does require that I write it up in NIH format in addition to the standard format required by the Dean’s office, so I get to join the wonderful world of people who’ve filled out all of that stuff. I hope it’s simpler than my AHA fellowship application was.

Tomorrow I have to take the day off to go to Mandeville, so I’ll follow my first day of daily posts with a day of no posting. My apologies!

One last note before I go home. Last night I found a great meditation timer for Palm OS, PocketDoan. It’s good for much, much more than meditation, though. People have siezed on it for use in work “dashes” particularly the (10+2)*5 method discussed at 43 Folders. I used it for that today and it was fantastic! I only got 3 dashes in today, and I only managed to finish one of the three without an interruption (though pausing is easy). I’m going to keep trying this and try to squeeze more 1-hour periods in per day. My ideal goal would be 7-8 per day.

The most important issues in scientific publishing

I’m in a bit of a pickle with a paper I’ve been writing for a while, and this post (which I had bookmarked because I thought it would have good writing tips — and it did, but not the kind I wanted) gave me a little bit of comic relief.

Actually, a lot of comic relief. If you’ve ever done research, applied for a grant, or tried to write a scientific paper, I’m 90+/-5% sure that you’ll get a kick out of this guy’s writeup.  I give an except below to give you some idea about how it reads:

Improbable Research

3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).

Atrial Natriuretic Peptide

A little while ago I made a note to myself to look up the effects of atrial natriuretic peptide. We’re having an air conditioning / server issue so I took care of this while waiting. Wikipedia, as usual, had the answer:

Atrial natriuretic peptide – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The overall effects of ANP release are a reduction in blood volume and therefore central venous pressure, cardiac output, and arterial blood pressure. It also increases renal sodium secretion and excretion. The overall effect of which is to counter the blood pressure-raising effects of the renin-angiotensin system.