Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · 4d

Aha - I did some minor sleuthing and realised the listed PMID leads to a different paper that definitely fits these index terms a whole lot better
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19067478/

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · 4d

Just sent an e-mail to Embase Support Centre about a very strangely indexed paper... I'm used to funny 'mistakes', but this definitely gets the cake. Any other #medlibs ever seen something like this before?

Screenshot of Embase.com results. It shows a paper titled 'Long-term effects of previous experience determine nutrient discrimination abilities in birds'. Some of the listed index terms are 'adolescent pregnancy', 'induced abortion', 'sexual education', 'sexually transmitted disease'.

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Sep 8

After giving multiple talks on #predatoryjournals and practices, I got to answer my first e-mail today about the quality of a specific journal - what are some standard checks other #medlibs like to do when looking at a journal?

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Sep 1

Thanks for making me laugh on a monday morning!

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 28

Thanks! Just figured this out as well... hope this is actually an issue and not a weird new interface thing, because I'm not sure what purpose this would serve lol

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 28

Any other #medlibs experiencing weird issues when trying to export results from #Scopus? it keeps saying it is exporting a RIS in the background, but the file never actually downloads

Screenshot of a Scopus message stating "Exporting 58 documents to RIS in the background."

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 28

Good luck! Could be something for the Scopus API, though I have no knowledge of how those work.... or otherwise you could split up your search into parts and merge them in your reg manager after

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 28

I had this happen once and was very proud of it lol. For me it was mostly because I used the combine queries option instead of being more economical with my query

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 25

Just started reading this paper, and would like to point out a huge power play from the authors... this paper was actually published by an elsevier journal #medlibs

Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 25

I often have wild daydreams of what crazy specific niche scenario could occur where I can finally flaunt my completely useless but VERY extensive knowledge of weird synonyms like this

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 25

Yikes..

Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · Aug 24

Huge variability documented in how publishers respond when informed about a problematic body of work by a research group. www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...
#publishers #retractions

Bar chart showing % of articles retracted, with expression of concern, or no action from different publishers. 100% no action from Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer; 100% retraction from Taylor and Francis.

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 21

i used to do this in a word doc where i could add a summary of the project and decisions made, but recently i've been using excel more, as it allows to archive varying versions in tabs. either way i love to color code the concepts

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 21

Reading an interesting paper with a proposal for how to report a search strategy, and i have wondered this before - how do other #medlibs archive and/or share strategies? doi.org/10.1002/cl2....

Academic searching is integral to research activities: (1) searching to retrieve specific information, (2) to expand our knowledge iteratively, (3) and to collate a representative and unbiased select...

doi.org

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 18

Don't worry, it gets worse! Someone on the dutch #medlib listserv had a similar problem when using wildcards - although when I tried taking a screenshot for bluesky suddenly it worked again.. but it still makes me a little wary

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 13

This is the first time I got this error message in #Scopus while translating a large search strategy... I feel like I deserve a ribbon now #medlibs

Screenshot of an error message, stating "Request-URl Too Long. The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for this server"

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 12

Sad to realise that what surprised me most about this article is not the existence of counterfeit citations or predatory practices, but how quickly some editors responded and retracted articles #medlibs

Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · Aug 11

"When LLMs or other AI tools are used to compose papers directly, rather than being employed as aids in composition, the resultant work is necessarily deprived of that actual expertise."

#medlibs 📚

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The citation catastrophe: Propagation of AI-generated counterfeit citations in scholarship

Knowledge creation in the academy is built upon the research of previous scholars. This legacy scholarship is tracked in new papers through the use of…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 12

wow! cant believe how incredibly useful Google's AI overview function is! now i know the exact differences between #OpenAlex and #MatildaScience

Screenshot of AI Overview summary. Matilda and OpenAlex are distinct entities with different purposes. Matilda is a fictional character, a young girl with exceptional intelligence and telekinetic abilities from Roald Dahl's novel. OpenAlex is a free and open index of scholarly articles, authors, institutions and concepts.

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 7

Also made a confused sound at the introduction stating "Using a relevancy algorithm that is well-guarded by the owning company"... since when?
doi.org/10.1111/jep....

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Aug 7

Sad to see they clearly did not consult a #medlib for this study. Most telling is the sentence "Taken collectively [...] suggests that Google Scholar cannot be used as a sole resource for systematic reviews [...]." Ah, so you mean like any sysrev guideline already tells you?

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 23

Experiencing what is now the third new bug in #scopus this month... this time I am unable to export any results and sometimes the same search string suddenly gives 0 results. I have sent yet another message to their customer support - at least they are very quick in responding so far #medlibs

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 21

I think this might win the prize of being the funniest spammy e-mail I have received so far - who wants to join me?

Screenshot of an e-mail starting with 'Hi Floor, Please allow me to personally invite you to our snowflake world tour'

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 16

if their critiques made it so people who thought they could cheat and fake their way through science changed their mind and stopped pursuing a scientific career i would argue that's another positive😂

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 15

My favorite way of doing #medlib work: being funny AND being critical!

Paije Wilson @potterynerd-8.bsky.social · Jul 14

Hey, all! I had way too much fun writing this WHSLA blog post, and figured I would share 😊 #medlibs whsla-wi.blogspot.com/2025/07/clow...

Clowning around with AI: Experimenting with article PDF summarizer tools

A blog from WHSLA (Wisconsin Health Sciences Library Association).

whsla-wi.blogspot.com

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 10

Good news for #medlibs on #scopus! They have now fixed the issue of a rogue space being added to proximity operators - I checked and the combine query function seems to be working as it should now

Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 9

A quick update on the #scopus issue: my colleague discovered it is due to a rogue space in the prox operator when using the combine query function. We have contacted customer service about this and they let their developers know. for now i'd stay away from this function to avoid mistakes! #medlibs

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Floor Boek @floorboek.bsky.social · Jul 10

Definitely adding this to my reading list as a medlib working for a semi-government institute for public health research... although I did notice that even though the title lists it as a scoping review, one of the author keywords is systematic review?

Katherine Cullerton @kcullerton.bsky.social · Jul 7

We often talk about corporations influencing research, but what about governments? 🧐 New paper by PhD student Helen Senior shows govt-funded public health research isn’t immune to influence - both positive and negative. Check it out 👉https://tinyurl.com/yjpkhtfk

How governments influence public health research: a scoping review

Abstract. Governments can become involved in academic research to assist in public health decision-making. However, when governments become involved, the r

tinyurl.com

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