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For the busy researcher, help from medical librarians with publishing papers

Yale Medicine Magazine, 2008 - Winter

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Picture the typical researcher’s desk, with journals piled high. Now imagine a librarian who can make those journals disappear—and reappear in a customized electronic library.

Perhaps you’re an investigator ready to submit an article. After countless revisions you need a fresh pair of eyes. Enter an editor, referred to you by the medical library. The editor checks for spelling, punctuation and grammar and suggests ways to streamline the piece. And here comes a librarian who will walk you through the software that will format your citations and bibliography to conform to the journal’s style.

Your article has been accepted—and published! You know you should submit it to PubMed Central, the free online archive of biomedical and life science journals operated by the NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information in the National Library of Medicine. But you’re busy. And you’ve spent enough time on that article. No problem: a librarian from the medical library will submit it for you.

These are a few of the services provided by librarians at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library—the new Publishing Support page on the library website describes all that they do.

Services include classes on using the library, links to online style manuals and help choosing bibliographic software. The Publishing Support page lists liaison librarians, who are specialists assigned to each department and research center to provide guidance to researchers in their area.

Other support services include information on a given journal’s impact factor, which is based on how often articles are cited in journals. Other information on the support site includes instructions for formatting papers; information on copyright issues; lists of library classes; and online tutorials on topics including scholarly publishing and using Ovid MEDLINE.

The new page, said Reference Librarian Lynn H. Sette, M.L.S., “is a natural extension of the kinds of things we have always done for people. Publishing and the library go hand in hand.”

The page can be accessed from the Cushing/Whitney home page or at http://library.medicine.yale.edu/services/crs/publishing.

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