Medical academic libraries in Romania - breaking with the past and turning towards the future.

This article is part of a series in this regular feature which looks at new directions in health science libraries. This article provides an updated overview of medical libraries in Romania, with a focus on the academic libraries which function under the patronage of medical schools. Information was collected through a survey questionnaire sent out to Romanian academic medical libraries in March 2017. The responses provide an overall picture of the state of Romanian medical libraries, highlighting the main trends and areas in which progress is evident, as well as the problems confronting these libraries. J.M.

Surgical Oncology in Romania: An Analysis of Research and Impact Based on Literature Search in PubMed and Web of Science.

BACKGROUND: With a long tradition and outstanding contributions over time, medical scientific research in Romania has experienced major changes in the last two decades, marked by an increase in scientific publications, originating especially from university centers and fostered by national regulations on publication standards required for professional promotion. This study is aimed at assessing the literature on surgical oncology in Romania, published by Romanian authors in journals indexed in international databases. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A literature search was performed, focused on surgical oncology performed in Romania. Two databases, PubMed and Web of Science (WoS), were finally selected and included in the study, which included bibliometric parameters and subject analysis. RESULTS: The PubMed search retrieved 464,295 articles being published in only 3 Romanian journals, Chirurgia, The Medical-Surgical Journal (Iasi), and Romanian Journal of Morphology and Embryology. The search of the Web of Science retrieved 494 records on the subject of surgical oncology in Romania, 449 of which were published after 1989. The 494 articles received 2,102 citations, 4.26 per year, and an overall Hirsch index of 21. Most articles were published in the same 3 Romanian journals as in PubMed. Neoplasms of the digestive system prevailed, followed by articles on general surgical oncology issues, cancer research, and therapy. Bucharest has the highest number of authors, followed by Cluj-Napoca and Iasi. CONCLUSION: Research originating from Romania in the field of surgical oncology is present and visible at an international level mainly through Romanian journals. Sustained effort is required from surgical oncology authors to be published in international journals on this subject, as it is the only way to increase global visibility and impact.

Optimization of the PubMed Automatic Term Mapping.

PubMed, freely available on the internet, is the best known database for medical information. We propose a method of optimization of the PubMed Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) that includes MeSH terms. This method is evaluated using two queries constructed to emphasize the differences between the PubMed queries as they are at present and also between these queries and the optimized one. The proposed query is significantly more precise than the current PubMed query (54.5% vs. 27%). The optimized query proposed would be easy to implement into PubMed.

An introduction to the Semantic Web for health sciences librarians.

OBJECTIVES: The paper (1) introduces health sciences librarians to the main concepts and principles of the Semantic Web (SW) and (2) briefly reviews a number of projects on the handling of biomedical information that uses SW technology. METHODOLOGY: The paper is structured into two main parts. "Semantic Web Technology" provides a high-level description, with examples, of the main standards and concepts: extensible markup language (XML), Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), ontologies, and their utility in information retrieval, concluding with mention of more advanced SW languages and their characteristics. "Semantic Web Applications and Research Projects in the Biomedical Field" is a brief review of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), Generalised Architecture for Languages, Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine (GALEN), HealthCyberMap, LinkBase, and the thesaurus of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The paper also mentions other benefits and by-products of the SW, citing projects related to them. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Some of the problems facing the SW vision are presented, especially the ways in which the librarians' expertise in organizing knowledge and in structuring information may contribute to SW projects.