If the Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository sounds familiar but is not something that you have accessed recently, it may be a good time to return for another look as this freely-available online resource has evolved quite a bit throughout its history. First conceived of in 1979, it began its presence on the Internet in 1995 and had several re-designs over the years as the Virginia Henderson International Nursing Library (1). Re-named the Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository in 2013, it was further transformed into the “open-access, full-text academic and clinical repository” that its developers continue to improve and upgrade even today.

From their website:

“The Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository (Henderson Repository) is the only repository solely dedicated to sharing works created by nurses. It is an open-access digital academic and clinical scholarship service that freely collects, preserves, and disseminates full-text nursing research and evidence-based practice materials. The repository is a resource of the honor society of nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

All nurses are invited to submit research-related or evidence-based practice works. These works may be authored by a single nurse, multiple nurses, or a collaborative group that includes a nurse. There is no fee to submit, and authors retain copyright to their materials, maintaining control of their work via a self-archiving mechanism.”

The Henderson Repository is a particularly good option for nurses interested in sharing their scholarship since it contains file/document types beyond published articles, including conference presentations, and accepts content from nurses of all degree levels and affiliations. Because it extends beyond the typical content found in commercial publications, this resource has been used as a grey literature source in systematic reviews publications (2, 3). With both basic and advanced search functionality, as well as, extensive browsing options, including by Author, Level of Evidence, and CINAHL Subject Headings, the Henderson Repository interface accommodates both novice and expert searchers.

(1) “Virginia Henderson International Nursing Library” Journal of the Medical Library Association vol. 94,3 (2006): 360–361.

(2) Burns T, Fernandez R, Stephens M. The experiences of adults who are on dialysis and waiting for a renal transplant from a deceased donor: a systematic review. JBI Database System Rev Implement Rep. 2015 Mar 12;13(2):169-211.

(3) Butler M, Collins R, Drennan J, Halligan P, O’Mathúna DP, Schultz TJ, Sheridan A, Vilis E. Hospital nurse staffing models and patient and staff-related outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2011 Jul 6;(7):CD007019.

For more information on this or other MSK Library resources, feel free to Ask Us!

The Open Access (OA) movement has resulted in millions of scholarly papers becoming freely-available to readers around the World. An often overlooked consequence of this phenomenon is the fact that the images included in a journal article generally also fall under the same licenses that dictate the re-use options for the entire publication.

With the increase in open source literature, having a specialized search engine that can help researchers identify needed OA biomedical images can be extremely helpful. The National Library of Medicine has created just that with its Open-i ^® service.

From their website:

“Open-i service of the National Library of Medicine enables search and retrieval of abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections. Searching may be done using text queries as well as query images. Open-i provides access to over 3.7 million images from about 1.2 million PubMed Central^® articles; 7,470 chest x-rays with 3,955 radiology reports; 67,517 images from NLM History of Medicine collection; and 2,064 orthopedic illustrations.”

The available limits that can be applied to refine the search results are quite comprehensive. Limit options include: Article type, Image type/diagnostic imaging modality, Collection/source, License type, Specialty, among other things, and the records can also be field-searched or ranked by research question type (treatment, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, genetics, etc).

Further reading:

• Demner-Fushman, D., Antani, S., Simpson, M., & Thoma, G. R. (2012). Design and development of a multimodal biomedical information retrieval system. Journal of Computing Science and Engineering, 6(2), 168-177.
• Technical Report (September 2010): Combining Text and Visual Features for Biomedical Information Retrieval