A new service is available to users of the Virtual Health Library. Since the beginning of April, it is now possible to view citation data from an indexed document in the Virtual Health Library (VHL) information sources through the Dimensions Badges service. It is possible to easily view how many citations a given publication has received, as well as to explore the citation data using the free Dimensions platform itself.
World Health Day is celebrated every year on April 7, to commemorate the founding of the World Health Organization in 1948 and to raise awareness of health-related issues. In 2021 the theme of this celebration is “Building a fairer, healthier world”. BIREME, as a specialized center in health scientific information of the Pan American Health Organization, within the scope of its mission to democratize information, knowledge and evidence for decision-making, adheres to this campaign, making the concept of equity be present in all its products and services.
On March 3, 2021 BIREME completed 54 years since its foundation. The tag cloud, specially created to mark the date, brings together key current terms that reflect the results of the team’s work over more than five decades based on innovation and the state of the art in information management, scientific evidence, and communication in health in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Twenty-three years ago, the Latin American and Caribbean Health Information Network met and approved a new health information and knowledge management model, the VHL – the Virtual Health Library, idealized by Abel Packer, former director of BIREME/PAHO/WHO. The proposed model had a common objective: to provide visibility and broad access to scientific and technical knowledge in health of and for the countries of the Latin American and Caribbean Region, contributing to narrow the gap between evidence and practice.
Originally launched during CRICS10 in 2018, e-BlueInfo is an application available for Android and iOS that puts in the hands of health professionals reliable and up-to-date information selected by experts from Ministries of Health and educational and research institutions, as well as including PAHO/WHO guidelines and scientific evidence available in the VHL information sources.
Representatives of the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) and the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) met on March 16 to align and monitor actions related to Term of Cooperation 93 (TC93). The second term of adjustment (TA2) of the TC93 includes elements such as the promotion of scientific research and the dissemination of technological knowledge in health.
Until recently, it was challenging to find information about strategies, policies, and roadmaps on knowledge management, which bibliographic databases, consortiums provide access to health information as well as to learn the scientific productivity per country and territory in the Americas. This is now changing with the launch of the Profiles on Knowledge Management and Access to Health Information in the Americas, a landscape of documents, statistics, networks, and indexes related to health information in the Region.
The National Medical Sciences Information Center and the National Council of Scientific Health Societies held the VII National Workshop on Scientific Publication in Health Sciences, which aimed to discuss the implementation of models in favor of Open Science in Cuba. The event was attended by speakers from Latin American and Caribbean countries, as well as PAHO and BIREME, one of its Specialized Centers.
As part of the celebration of DeCS’s 35 years, BIREME launches an innovative service for researchers, editors, and librarians in the health sciences field, the DeCS/MeSH finder. Available since February 9th, this service, which works online, automatically locates any descriptor, synonym, or qualifier of the DeCS/MeSH-controlled vocabulary of a given text in Portuguese, Spanish, English or French, in a fraction of seconds.
In order to make it easier, faster, and more objective to search for scientific evidence for decision-making in health, BIREME and the Knowledge and Evidence Translation Program, both from PAHO/WHO’s EIH Department, developed the innovative tool Evid@Easy. Using pre-designed search strategies, Evid@Easy offers ways to find scientific evidence available in the VHL according to each stage of the decision-making process.