Searching online and Web-based resources for information on natural products used as drugs.

Finding and evaluating information on natural products used as drugs can present challenges to the information professional. In this study, eight databases including resources retrieved on the Web were compared for relevancy and uniqueness. Ten reference questions related to natural products used as drugs were searched in the latest three year file of a number of databases, including MEDLINE, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, and EMBASE/Excerpta Medica. In addition, the Web was searched for relevant Internet sites using the Alta Vista search engine. EMBASE/Excerpta Medica retrieved the largest number of relevant citations for four of the ten questions. MEDLINE, the Health Reference Center, and Alta Vista each retrieved the largest numbers in two questions. Overall, the standard medical databases were the first choice for the health professional and for many lay people because of their more extensive indexing and coverage of authoritative journals.

Rich in resources/deficient in dollars! Which titles do reference departments really need?

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE: Budget pressures, combined with the growing availability of resources, dictate careful examination of reference use. Two studies were conducted at the University of Maryland Health Sciences Library to examine this issue. A twelve-month reshelving study determined use by title and discipline; a simultaneous study analyzed print abstract and index use in an electronic environment. METHODOLOGY: Staff electronically recorded statistics for unshelved reference books, coded the collection by discipline, and tracked use by school. Oral surveys administered to reference room abstract and index users focused on title usage, user demographics, and stated reason for use. RESULTS: Sixty-five and a half percent of reference collection titles were used. Medical titles received the most use, but, in the context of collection size, dentistry and nursing titles used the greatest percentage of their collections. At an individual title level, medical textbooks and drug handbooks were most used. Users of abstracts and indexes were primarily campus nursing and medical students who preferred print resources. CONCLUSION: The monograph data will guide reference expenditures in canceling little-used standing orders, expanding most-used portions of the collection, and analyzing underused sections. The abstract and index survey identified the following needs: targeting instruction, contacting faculty who assign print resources, increasing the number of computer workstations, and installing signs linking databases to print equivalents.

Where should the pharmacy researcher look first? Comparing International Pharmaceutical Abstracts and MEDLINE.

This study compared the usefulness of various CD-ROM versions of International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) and MEDLINE for pharmacy research. Journal coverage as well as the strengths and weaknesses of database structure and contents were considered. The journals indexed in each database were compared to those identified in a survey of the research journals most important to University of Maryland at Baltimore pharmacy faculty and in a similar North Carolina study rating pharmacy journals. In addition, indexed journals were checked against the Institute for Scientific Information's most recent list of high-impact journals in pharmacology and pharmacy. Searches representing a variety of topics relevant to pharmacy were conducted in both databases, and the number and relevance of citations located were analyzed. Results showed that IPA indexed a greater number of pharmacy titles, but that MEDLINE indexed more pharmacy journals designated in studies as significant to the field. There was little overlap in coverage between the two databases. MEDLINE produced larger retrievals for the majority of questions, but many citations retrieved in IPA did not appear in MEDLINE.

Mechanisms of hypnotic and nonhypnotic forgetting.

Subjects participated in two experimental sessions designed to study laboratory-induced amnesia, one using a standard hypnosis paradigm and one using a non-hypnotic directed-forgetting paradigm. Two independent sources of variation were derived from the hypnotic amnesia data: retrieval inhibition and inhibition release. In the nonhypnotic directed-forgetting procedure, some items were cued to be forgotten shortly after presentation and some were cued to be remembered. At test, the subjects were asked to recall both the to-be-remembered and the to-be-forgotten items. Over 39% of the variance in the recall of the to-be-forgotten items could be accounted for by the inhibition and release constructs obtained with hypnosis. These relations between the two procedures were not mediated by verbal ability or cognitive style (field independence). We concluded that the mechanisms of forgetting involved in laboratory demonstrations of hypnotic and nonhypnotic amnesia are related, and the implication is that some of them are the same, namely, retrieval inhibition and inhibition release. We also argued that the possible demand characteristics that accompany the hypnosis procedure are not apparent with the nonhypnotic procedure. Therefore, the relationships observed in the present results were taken as evidence that hypnotically induced amnesia is not entirely the result of subjects' reactions to demand characteristics.

Disrupted retrieval in directed forgetting: a link with posthypnotic amnesia.

Certain reliable findings from research on directed forgetting seem difficult to accommodate in terms of the theoretical processes, such as selective rehearsal or storage differentiation, that have been put forward to account for directed-forgetting phenomena. Some kind of "missing mechanism" appears to be involved. In order to circumvent the methodological constraints that have limited the conclusions investigators could draw from past experiments, a new paradigm is introduced herein that includes a mixture of intentional and incidental learning. With this paradigm, a midlist instruction to forget the first half of a list was found to reduce later recall of the items learned incidentally as well as those learned intentionally. This result suggests that a cue to forget can lead to a disruption of retrieval processes as well as to the alteration of encoding processes postulated in prior theories. The results also provide a link between intentional forgetting and the literature on posthypnotic amnesia, in which disrupted retrieval has been implicated. With each of these procedures, the information that can be remembered is typically recalled out of order and often with limited recollection for when the information had been presented. It therefore was concluded here that retrieval inhibition plays a significant role in nonhypnotic as well as in hypnotic instances of directed forgetting. The usefulness of retrieval inhibition as a mechanism for memory updating was also discussed.

Sinoatrial node artery distribution and its relation to hierarchy of cardiac automaticity.

The sinoatrial node (SAN) artery (SANA) was cannulated in dogs anesthetized with chloralose (7 dogs) or pentobarbital (1 dog). Intra-SANA injection of acetylcholine (ACh) with edrophonium (EPh) produced a transient junctional rhythm (JR) when the cannula tip lay near SANA origin. However, when ACh-EPh was injected while the cannula tip lay within SAN region, a slower P wave rhythm, rather than a JR, developed. To determine visually the injected ACh-EPh distribution, an equal volume of dye was injected under similar conditions. Dye-distribution patterns were consistent in all atria. These averaged 44 +/- 2% of the total endocardial surface, indicating that SANA distribution is not discrete, but widespread. Dye extended cranially, caudally, and laterally and included documented subsidiary pacemaker sites. Dye approached, but never trespassed, the coronary sinus ostium. Results suggest that cholinergic drug injection into the proximal SANA may suppress not only the SAN, but subsidiary atrial pacemakers as well. In this situation, junctional pacemakers probably emerge, not because of inherently greater automaticity, but after default of subsidiary atrial pacemakers.

Significant enhancement of T-strain mycoplasmal growth on supplemented Shepard's A6 differential agar.

Growth of T-strain mycoplasmas was significantly improved by supplementing Shepard's A6 medium with sodium thioglycolate, cysteine hydrochloride, mercaptoethanol, or dithiothreitol.