AIDSNEW Treatment Alerts: appendix.This is a technical appendix to "Daily News Alerts Selected by AIDS Treatment News: www.connotea.org/group/aidsnew" (in this issue). What Medical Journals and Other Sites Do We Cover? We focus on research reports in medical journals including: AIDS Annals of Internal Medicine Annals of Internal Medicine (Ann Intern Med) is an academic medical journal published by the American College of Physicians (ACP). It publishes research articles and reviews in the area of internal medicine. Its current editor is Harold C. Sox. British Medical Journal The British Medical Journal, or BMJ, is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world.[2] It is published by the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (owned by the British Medical Association), whose other Clinical Infectious Diseases Clinical Infectious Diseases in an academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press which publishes articles on the pathogenesis, clinical investigation, medical microbiology, diagnosis, immune mechanisms, and treatment of diseases caused by infectious agents. JAIDS JAIDS Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) A viral disease of humans caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which attacks and compromises the body's immune system. ) HIV HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), either of two closely related retroviruses that invade T-helper lymphocytes and are responsible for AIDS. There are two types of HIV: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is responsible for the vast majority of AIDS in the United States. Medicine JAMA JAMA abbr. Journal of the American Medical Association Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care Journal of Infectious Diseases infectious diseases: see communicable diseases. The Lancet MMWR MMWR Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report Epidemiology A news bulletin published by the CDC, which provides epidemiologic data–eg, statistics on the incidence of AIDS, rabies, rubella, STDs and other communicable diseases, causes of mortality–eg, Nature Medicine New England Journal of Medicine The New England Journal of Medicine (New Engl J Med or NEJM) is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world. PLOS Medicine PLoS Medicine is a scientific journal covering the full spectrum of the medical sciences it began operation on October 19, 2004. It was the second journal of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) a non-profit organization which releases scientific content under open access (Public Library of Science) Science any other journals when we see important research; also, presentations at conferences. We include articles published on AIDS sites, for example: AEGIS, http://www.aegis.org AIDSmeds.com, http://www.aidsmeds.com AIDSmap.com, http://www.aidsmap.com HIV Treatment Bulletin (iBase), http://www.i-base.org.uk/htb/ The Body, http://www.thebody.com HIVandHepatitis.com, http://www.hivandhepatitis.com Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Report, http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm NATAP NATAP National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project NATAP North American Trade Automation Prototype , http://www.natap.org Clinical Care Options for HIV, http://www.ClinicalOptions.com/hiv POZ, http://www.poz.com TAG, http://www.aidsinfonyc.org/tag/ We also include other AIDS sites, and some online newspaper articles if they do not require registration. Receiving Our Alerts in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) A syndication format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for aggregating updates to blogs and the news sites. RSS has also stood for "Rich Site Summary" and "RDF Site Summary. If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to Verb 1. subscribe to - receive or obtain regularly; "We take the Times every day" subscribe, take buy, purchase - obtain by purchase; acquire by means of a financial transaction; "The family purchased a new car"; "The conglomerate acquired a new company"; our alert service and receive our alerts. Unless you are already using RSS, it provides little advantage in using the AIDSNEW alert service. RSS is good for following many different blogs or other news sources simultaneously. If you are using only a few news sources, RSS is unnecessary. Searching, AIDSNEW, and Connotea You do not need to do any searching on AIDSNEW, since its main purpose is to supply recent news you may never have heard of (and therefore cannot search for)--not to provide an archival database of news. But you can use Connotea to search for bookmarks (Web links) contributed by many scientists and doctors, not just us. For example, AIDS Treatment News added fewer than 300 bookmarks (Web links to news) to AIDSNEW before announcing this service--while a search for HIV found over 4,000 bookmarks on Connotea. To search, use the bar near the top of the Connotea page. Set the search to "All", enter "HIV" (quotation marks quotation marks Noun, pl the punctuation marks used to begin and end a quotation, either `` and '' or ` and ' quotation marks npl → comillas fpl and capitalization not necessary), and click "Find results". Or use multiple words to find bookmarks that include all of them; for example, "HIV tuberculosis" currently finds 66 bookmarks. You can click on any of the "tags" (user-chosen categories) to find other bookmarks on that subject. How Our AIDSNEW Alert Service Differs from Other News Sources Google News, etc.: Google News (http://news.google.com) is very good if you know what you are looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. , and have at least one key word to help distinguish it from the more than 2,000,000 other news stories (from 4,500 different sources) on Google News at any one time. You can follow some AIDS developments there by searching for 'HIV' (we do so, for leads). But our AIDSNEW alert service offers our judgment of what is important for our readership--not just a list of recent stories that contain the word 'HIV'. Blogs: Our AIDSNEW service provides selected Web links, much like a blog, but is easier to publish. Connotea knows how to handle the messy Web addresses used at many sites. Publishers' commentary is clearly optional. Basically you only need to click to immediately publish the Web page that you are visiting (Connotea currently requires a little extra work, but this could go away in the future). Therefore organizations can keep their news up to date more easily than with a blog. Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report: This useful news-alert service from the Kaiser Family Foundation The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), or just Kaiser Family Foundation, is a U.S.-based non-profit, private operating foundation headquartered in Menlo Park, California. (http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm) offers human judgment and selection, like our alerts; it also lets you scan major AIDS news in a few minutes a week. The main difference is that with AIDSNEW we can provide a different specialized news feed at a tiny fraction of the resources Kaiser must spend to do theirs. Therefore hundreds of organizations and individuals could use Connotea or similar services (such as Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) to publish news alerts in their own areas of expertise--giving readers a wide choice of which specialties, experts, or teams they want to follow. Amedeo: This free service emails a weekly alert of links to journal articles, for HIV/AIDS or any of dozens of other medical specialties (visit http://www.amedeo.com/medicine/hiv.htm to sign up). Readers can customize the default list of journals for their specialty. But Amedeo only looks at journals--and only offers a choice of about 50 of them for all the medical specialties together (not including PLOS Medicine, for example, as of December 2006). In contrast, AIDSNEW can include any journal abstracts, or almost anything else publicly available on the Web. And we select our alerts for a defined audience (in this case, readers of AIDS Treatment News), while Amedeo seems to be for AIDS doctors and scientists in general. AIDS Treatment News: Since we can click to publish alerts on AIDSNEW instead of writing the stories ourselves, we can publish more than 10 times as many alerts--and get them online many times faster than the newsletter. The "Wisdom of Crowds" A big focus in online services today is databases that combine information from many people, and therefore can become better as they are used, often through a voting system of some kind. A classic example is the Google search engine, which returns the most-linked-to Web pages first (instead of returning thousands of pages in no particular order, as early search engines sometimes did). And news sites like Digg let readers vote on stories, automatically promoting more popular ones to more prominence on the site. We do not know of any good wisdom-of-crowd sites in AIDS at this time--suggesting a project for someone to take on. (Digg currently has very little news on HIV. It would be easy to put news there--but harder to build a constituency.) The emphasis on wisdom-of-crowds popularity in the online world should not obscure the additional need for experts educating crowds. People make poor choices if they do not know the real options available. Expertise alone with no reference to popular appeal can lead to boring or incomprehensible information (sometimes the academic standard). But popularity without expertise can lead to shallowness, with endless stories promoted mainly for their star or freak-show qualities, or for unseen agendas (for example, see TV news). We need the wisdom of both experts and crowds. In the future, software could help people select their own experts within different news feeds. Readers might set up their own profiles including hundreds of experts, few of whom they know--creating unique, complex personal views to alert them to what is new in the world and important to them. Notes (1.) We go to considerable trouble to spare our readers from silly and burdensome registration requirements on the sites we bookmark--or offensive advertisements such as those that deliberately cover up the text you are reading. When we do include a Web page that requires free registration, we say so. And we do not bookmark A stored location for quick retrieval at a later date. Web browsers provide bookmarks that contain the addresses (URLs) of favorite sites. Most electronic references, large text databases and help systems provide bookmarks that mark a location users want to revisit in the future. articles that have no free abstract, and require non-subscribers to pay an exorbitant fee up to $40 or more to read any part of the article; this does mean that some news we would otherwise cover is not included here. Another problem is that journals sometimes publish research online first (which is good), but then abandon that Web address for a different addressing scheme when the print journal comes out. We watch for this glitch A temporary or random hardware malfunction. It is possible that a bug in a program may cause the hardware to appear as if it had a glitch in it and vice versa. At times it can be extremely difficult to determine whether a problem lies within the hardware or the software. See glitch attack. and re-enter re·en·ter also re-en·ter v. re·en·tered, re·en·ter·ing, re·en·ters v.tr. 1. To enter or come in to again. 2. To record again on a list or ledger. v.intr. the bookmark when it happens, but sometimes we miss one. (2.) If there are issues about your right to distribute certain material, you might want to avoid putting it on the Web, where copyright owners can easily search for unauthorized copies. Be aware that some email lists post their messages to the Web automatically. It is better to avoid problems by writing your own short message, action alert, or press release--and give your readers authoritative background by linking to free news stories (found through Google News, for example--or through our AIDSNEW service). But even though those stories are free, that does not create any right to copy their text, etc. into your Web site or blog. Link to the information, instead of copying it. (3.) Let us know if you see a recent article that we should cover, but missed. And tell us if a bookmark doesn't work for any reason. See below for how to email us about this project. (4.) We can share what we have learned to help others set up services like AIDSNEW. If you are interested, contact this writer at aidsnews@aidsnews.org (and preferably include "alerts" is the subject line, to bypass spam control). |
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