In Our Own Voices: Exploring Immigrant Community Perspectives in NLM Resources
Using selected workshop proceedings from NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Bookshelf, librarians lead a journal club for health sciences students and faculty. After discussing the provided article, participants work through NCBI Bookshelf tutorials to find further related resources from NLM.
-
- The National Library of Medicine offers multiple ways to explore health information resources that are written by or with communities shown to be underrepresented in biomedical research.
- NCBI advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information, including free full-text journals, books, and conference proceedings.
- Journal clubs are regular gatherings of colleagues or classmates to summarize and discuss papers published in research journals, most frequently in the sciences.
- This public program introduces health sciences students to NCBI Bookshelf and other NLM resources to explore community-based biomedical research and healthcare self-advocacy through a Voices of Immigrants journal club.
-
- Using Outside/Inside: Immigration, Migration, and Health Care in the United States as a lens, participants understand how immigrants to the United States and immigrant communities have advocated for accessible healthcare.
- Participants gain critical reading skills through discussing health sciences workshop proceedings.
- Participants learn about NCBI Bookshelf and how Bookshelf can serve as a resource portal.
-
Get started with 5 Tips for Journal Club First-Timers from the NIH’s I am Intramural Blog.
NCBI Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in the life science and healthcare:
- Bookshelf tutorials are short video tutorials that highlight features of Bookshelf including browsing, searching, and using facets.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity. Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2018 Aug 30. The Voices of Immigrants.
The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled and hierarchically-organized vocabulary produced by NLM. It is used for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical and health-related information. MeSH includes the subject headings appearing in MEDLINE/PubMed, the NLM Catalog, and other NLM databases.
PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health–both globally and personally. The PubMed database contains more than 30 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature.
Close Close All Open All -
Time
- Planning: 3 hours
- Implementation: 1.5 hours
Budget
- No funds are required to run this program as described
Suggested supplies
- Tablets/computers for students to access the NCBI Bookshelf tutorials
- Printed copies of the article to discuss or tablets/computers for students to read the article online
Before the program
- Pre-circulate the link to the article to discuss
-
- Amplify and contextualize this program by making it part of a National Health Observance such as Minority Health Month (April), Citizen Science Month (April), or National Family Health History Month (November).
- Partner with a local cultural organization, community clinic, and/or translator to develop and co-create the course. Offer fair compensation or a mutual benefit such as providing the course materials for future use or covering translation costs.
-
- Have participants count off by four to place them in four small groups. Each group will be assigned one of the sections in The Voices of Immigrants, a chapter from Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health: Proceedings of a Workshop. Individually, participants can take 10 minutes to read and annotate their assigned section. The four sections are:
- Serving A Diverse Asian American Community (1)
- The Plight of Veterans (2)
- Photographs of Immigrants' Lives (3)
- From Medical School to Community (4)
- In their small groups, participants can discuss the following for 10 minutes:
- What is the goal of the research?
- What are the benefits of including and involving immigrants in health research or practice?
- What are the limitations of the research?
- What audiences might benefit from learning about this research?
- After the small group discussion, one person from each group can present to all participants on each section, giving a summary of the section read and some key discussion points or takeaways from their group; allow up to five minutes per group.
- Direct participants to NCBI Bookshelf tutorials, and allow participants at least 20 minutes to work through the tutorials.
- In groups, participants can use what they learned to explore materials related to The Voices of Immigrants. Each group may identify and propose one title for use at a future meeting of the journal club.
- Have participants count off by four to place them in four small groups. Each group will be assigned one of the sections in The Voices of Immigrants, a chapter from Immigration as a Social Determinant of Health: Proceedings of a Workshop. Individually, participants can take 10 minutes to read and annotate their assigned section. The four sections are: