Orientation and Instructional Classes

Training when and where you need it!

The Scientific Library provides a variety of classes free to you. Select class title below to see the description of recent classes. If you prefer a Customized Session, one of our Librarians will meet with you or your group at a time convenient to you. 

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Library Training Classes Available Upon Request

Class Descriptions

Clinicaltrials.gov: Searching for Clinical Studies

Clinicaltrials.gov is a Web-based resource that provides easy access to information on publicly and privately supported clinical studies on a wide range of diseases and conditions. In this webinar, you will learn tips and tricks to best achieve comprehensive results utilizing advanced features of this very robust interface.

Copyright Basics for Authors

This webinar will give authors a basic introduction to U.S. copyright and the legal and ethical issues surrounding copyright and plagiarism. Participants will learn to identify and avoid potential copyright infringement issues, as well as how the law is designed to help authors and creators.

Dictionary of Natural Products

The Dictionary of Natural Products contains exhaustive natural products information abstracted from the scientific literature. Search this database by structure, chemical name, or other identifier to learn more about a specific product, or search by type of compound, biological use, development status or other concept to explore a relevant list of natural products and access useful information for each, such as physical and chemical properties, biological source, synthesis, derivatives, toxicity and more.

EndNote Advanced: Building Your Library

This webinar will discuss the different ways to add references to an EndNote library—automatically using various databases, importing PDF files, and creating references manually.

EndNote Advanced: Editing Output Styles

This webinar will help you use EndNote to format your Word documents to match publishing guidelines and reporting requirements by editing output styles. You will also learn how EndNote can help with figures and tables in documents.

EndNote Advanced: Working With Word Documents

This webinar will discuss inserting citations for EndNote references into a Word document, reformatting a document, inserting figures, creating bibliographies, and more.

EndNote Advanced: Working With Your Library

This webinar will help you develop your EndNote library with the use of term lists, finding duplicate references and updates for references, and altering text and fields in references. Searching your library will also be covered.

EndNote Essentials

In this class you will learn the basics of EndNote so you can immediately use this popular software. The class covers creating libraries, populating libraries by importing PubMed references, grouping references, and an introduction to generating bibliographies through Microsoft Word.

Ensembl Genome Browser

Ensembl provides a colorful and attractive interface for discovering interesting features aligned to the Reference Human Genome and to genomes of other important species. Learn how to locate and download information about genes and their associated transcripts, variants, regulatory elements, phenotypes, and more.

Exploring the Mouse Genomics Informatics Resource

The Mouse Genome Informatics Resource provides mouse genetic, genomic and biological data relevant to the study of human health and disease. In this class you will learn how to find answers to questions like: Is there a mouse model available for this human disease? What primers will amplify this mouse gene? What Gene Ontology terms do these mouse genes share in common? Do any mice express Cre in this specific tissue? What expression data are available from mice mutated at this locus?

Exploring PubChem

PubChem, a rich source of Bioactivity data for small molecules, gathers its data from many screening projects as well as from more focused projects harvested from the scientific literature, and presents this data freely to the scientific community in standardized formats, making it easy to track down what compounds have been tested in which bioassays with what results. It also summarizes laboratory safety data, physical property data, patents, and other useful information about a compound all on a single report page for that compound. In this class, we will learn how to navigate PubChem to 1) find compounds using simple and advanced text based search techniques; 2) find compounds using structure and substructure based search; 3) find compounds similar to a known bioactive compound; 4) find biological screens and screening results of interest; 5) Use PubChem tools tool to help make sense of all the data

Find Open Access Scientific Images and Education Resources

Learn how to locate public domain and Creative Commons-license images and online educational resources.

Introduction to Open Access Policies and Resources

Learn about the NIH Public Access Policy and other important open access policies and initiatives. Also learn about resources to locate open access journals, publishers, and repositories.

Managing Publications

In this class, instructors will guide you through the process of tracking your citations, touching on preprints, PubMed Central, the NIH Manuscript Submission System, and using EndNote to manage your publication library.

Managing References with EndNote

In this webinar, you will learn how to use the reference management software EndNote to organize your references and create in-text citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word. This training covers creating a new EndNote Library, importing references from PubMed and Web of Science, grouping/editing/searching references in EndNote, finding full text and PDFs for references in EndNote, integrating EndNote with Microsoft Word, and an overview of EndNote Online.

MetaDrug

The Scientific Library is happy to host MetaDrug trainer Kinsi Oberoi of Thomson Reuters for a hands-on session. MetaDrug is a manually curated knowledge database and software suite that can help you predict possible Indications, Modes of Action, ADME, Phase I and Phase II metabolites, and Toxicities of novel compounds. It also allows you to view the predicted activities on pathway maps that can be validated by uploading experimental data for the compounds, once available. In this workshop, you will learn to search by disease, pathway, compound and more, and to make predictions for the activities of novel compounds.

NCBI: Introduction to Genome Data Viewer

Participants will learn how to use NCBI’s new Genome Data Viewer to search for and access sequence and annotation data from more than 500 Eukaryotic genomic assemblies at NCBI, as well as Hub data from UCSC, to quickly find variation, expression, and phenotype information, and to compare their own data for rapid discovery.

NCBI: A Practical Guide to BLAST

This workshop highlights important features and demonstrates the practical aspects of using the sequence similarity service, NCBI BLAST. Learn about useful features of the service including the new genome BLAST; Align-2-Sequences; organism limits and other filters; as well as formatting options and downloading options.

NCBI: Resources for Human Genomics Research

Participants will learn how to navigate NCBI to find and download genomic sequences and annotations, view variants associated with a particular gene or condition, and access gene expression data.

OneSearch Overview

OneSearch can help quickly discover relevant information on any topic from across many of the Scientific Library’s resources with a single search. Locate resources within and beyond the Library’s print and electronic collections and search available full text.

Orientation

New employees receive information on the Scientific Library soon after their start date.  Library orientation sessions are conducted in the Summer for interns and can also be conducted upon request.

An Overview of NCBI Resources

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) works to organize the world’s molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics research information in a series of more than thirty databases. In this class, you will learn various ways to search and navigate NCBI resources to easily find the information you need.

Patent Search for the Biomedical Sciences

In this class you will learn the strategies needed for searching the patent literature related to the biomedical sciences and get hands-on experience using online resources available for patent search.

Pharmaprojects: An Introduction

The industry’s most trusted drug development database, Citeline’s Pharmaprojects has been covering pharma R&D across global markets for 35+ years. With 68,000+ drug profiles including 15,000 drugs in active development, it’s the go-to resource for preclinical, clinical, and pipeline coverage, and lifecycle management tracking.

PubMed: Improve Your Skills

You probably use PubMed daily, but do you use it completely? Do you know what MeSH is? Can you set up Alerts to receive current information? Do you use "My NCBI?" Are you able to move references from PubMed into EndNote? Are you having trouble locating full-text journal articles? If you take time now to attend this hands-on training, then your future PubMed searching sessions will be faster and more productive, and will yield more relevant results.

Quick Review of NCBI Resources

In this class, you will learn about the massive amounts of information that flows into the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), how it is organized into related databases, and most importantly, how researchers can navigate this system of databases to quickly access the information most relevant to their needs.

Quick Tour of Chemistry Resources

This training session is designed to give you a brief overview of several chemistry resources available to FNLCR and NCI at Frederick researchers. Among the resources covered in this class are: PubChem - providing information on the biological activities of small molecules, Reaxys - providing workflow tools designed to support planning optimization in chemistry and related disciplines, and the Enhanced NCI Database Browser - providing access to information about the activities of compounds tested against the NCI 60 panel of cell lines.

Reaxys

Learn about this unique, web-based chemistry database from Elsevier Science, consisting of deeply excerpted compounds and related factual properties, reaction and synthesis information as well as bibliographic data, navigated and displayed in a user-friendly interface.

Resource of the Month

Each month the library highlights one of many resources available to you.

Resources for Finding and Managing Research Data

Learn about resources to help researchers create data management plans, find data standards and data repositories, search for datasets for re-use, and cite datasets.

Scopus

If you want to get a complete analysis of your publications' research impact, Scopus will be a helpful addition to your research. Scopus is another source (in addition to Web of Science) that not only allows you to search the scientific literature, but also helps you to see and track who is citing publications of interest to you. This class will introduce you to the citation analysis tools within Scopus, as well as its search options.

Sharing Your Research through Unique Identifiers and Author Profiles: ORCID and Beyond

Learn about unique author identifiers (ORCID and ResearcherID), author profiles generated by databases (Scopus and Web of Science), and user-created author profiles (ResearchGate, Google Scholar Citations, and SciENcv).

Showing Your Impact Using Metrics and Altmetrics

Go beyond the journal impact factor and find out how altmetrics and article-level metrics can show the level of attention an individual article or other research output receives from social media sites, news outlets, and other sources.

Text Mining for Biomedical Science

Text mining involves the use of computers to aid in extracting usable information quickly from large numbers of documents. In this class you will learn basic text mining concepts and get hands-on experience using free tools available for text mining in the biomedical sciences.

Tools for Locating Literature Reviews

Learn about resources for locating literature reviews, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Tools for Locating Preprints

Learn about databases for searching biomedical preprints, including individual preprint servers and resources for searching across multiple preprint servers at once.

Tools to Stay Current in Biomedical Research

Learn how to monitor recent articles from a specific journal, by a specific author, or on any biomedical topic using email alerts and RSS feeds. Also learn about other tools for staying current in your research field, including Daily Science News, biomedical journal podcasts, hashtags and institutional accounts on social media, webinars, seminars, and scientific meetings.

Tracking Publications

When you must do an annual report of your publications, the task of tracking your citations -- from the time of publication, and then as required for government-funded research, depositing the article in PubMed Central, to an inclusive final report -- can be daunting. In this class, instructors will guide you through the process, touching on EndNote, PubMed Central and the NIH Manuscript Submission System, and various "Alerts" options.

University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser

Learn about one of the most widely used genome browsers, the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Genome Browser to learn how to find what is known about specific genomic regions, genes, SNPs, and more.