Odds & Ends of Possible Interest (updated – 22 05 26)

by Rob Penfold | Jan 23, 2026 | News

“Can a chatbot be used in the full-text screening in a systematic review?”

•  “ChatGPT 5.0 … approaching but not matching human performance.”
• ” AI can substantially reduce the time and labor required”

🐘 Left hand truncation (from the expert searching listserv – mainly added so could use the elephant icon for truncation)

• “left-hand truncation is possible in Cochrane Wiley, which can be quite helpful. For example, *glyc*mi* returns multiple spellings, including hypoglycaemia, hyperglycemic, glycaemic, etc”
•  “MEDLINE through Web of Science makes left truncation possible: *therap* in title: 1,514,613 hits; therap* in title: 1,111,039”
  “While we cannot left-truncate in Ovid, we can mid-truncate.C*fentan*.ti. for example retrieves cyclopropylfentanyl along with carfentanil, carfentanyl, etc.”

Latest issue of JMLA 

• Comparing five generative AI chatbots’ answers to LLM-generated clinical questions with medical information scientists’ evidence summaries
• Comparing the performance of narrow vs. broad search strategies when using machine learning-based software for title/abstract screening
• Enhancing patient care: the power of librarian-mediated literature reviews (look for the 💎)
• Expert-recommended tasks for hospital librarians during a healthcare system merger or acquisition

Latest issue of JoHILA

• Leadership roles and competencies of Australian health sciences library leaders
• Demonstrating value by measuring your success: the power of an audit
• Health and Wellbeing Spaces in Health Libraries

Tip#66: Searching for author names in PubMed (an overview, headaches, and an Excel shortcut!)

Redesigned Research Rabbit (7 min video)

The 2026 AI Index Report (definitely worth a quick scroll through)

Library Skills “Free resources to help library staff level up and learn new skills”

Google has a secret reference desk – here’s how to use it

• “Try: climate AROUND(3) policy”
• “laptop $500..$800 returns results mentioning prices in that range. The same syntax works for years (civil rights legislation 1964..1968) or any other measurement”
• “mental health social media research after:2023”

AI in practice: trends in hospital and clinic libraries, 2026

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2.5 million biomedical papers

    ”An analysis of 97 million references has found that rates of fabricated citations have climbed steeply since 2023″

🔎 Windows File Explorer keyboard shortcuts (most useful at the top)

Address bar           Ctrl L (search by typing, arrow down to select) 

Open                 Win E   

Search               Ctrl F (good for internal strings, else Address etc) 

Sidebar (focus)        Shift Tab  (good for moving to folders list from files list)

Sidebar (unfocus)      Tab (good for moving to files list from folders list)

Forward / Back        Alt right / left arrow 

Full screen            F11                    

New Folder           Ctrl Shft N 

New Window          Ctrl N                

Parent (folder)         Alt Up Arrow  

Preview (file)          Alt P

Properties (file)        Alt Enter          

Rename              F2       

Tab (switch)           Ctrl Tab (same as browser)

Tab (new)               Ctrl T

Best Search Engines for Research Papers in 2026

• video / 9 tools ranked including a number of ai ones

What Happens When AI Can Use the Library

• discusses MCP which is an approach that lets AI agents more easily navigate sites, platforms etc. Probably coming to an LMS near you

Yale Library is testing an AI-powered connection for deeper searching of library resources

• another MCP example

Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books

How Australia Built a Standards-Based National Lending Network

What’s a library worth? Report puts dollar figure on ‘invaluable’ institutions

Automate your library’s e-resource access testing (compatible with EZProxy & OpenAthens)

Deduping tool

Systematic reviews in minutes to hours

• Scholara tool used is free to try

The Horseless Carriage of AI Search: Why Using LLMs to Generate Boolean Alone Is Likely of Little Benefit

Libraries 2045: What Will the Next 20 Years of Libraries and AI Look Like?

Health Sciences Library Group 2026 Conference presentations

Horizon Europe decision: ‘benefits for decades’, say unis

• closer ties between European and Australian research

Search String Theory – Applying pairwise combinatorics to PubMed searches

• “tool designed to streamline the creation of complex PubMed search strings”

From hospital-by-default to neighbourhood-by-design

Goodbye 1800Medicare: it was brief, but nice knowing you

• “other agents such Claude Health and Wellness AI are gaining patient traction so fast that the NHS is in a dilemma about how it will manage its comprehensive information triage service – an equivalent idea to 1800Medicare which has been around more than a decade.”

Wolters Kluwer partners with Microsoft to bring trusted clinical intelligence to Microsoft productivity workflows

• “Wolters Kluwer Health today announced a collaboration with Microsoft that integrates UpToDate®, a leading clinical decision support (CDS) solution, with Microsoft Dragon Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Teams”

Healthdirect signals major shift: ‘front end has changed; the mission has not’

• Healthdirect considering how it can make it’s content appear in Google AI snippets more effectively

Genomics and Your Hospital : A toolkit to support hospitals implement high-quality genomic care

New AI agents and referral platforms might rewire Australian healthcare by stealth

• “But no Australian health institution dealing at scale with patients will be able to ignore what Amazon has now shown the new AI agents can do at scale in the UC San Diego Health experiment: EMR linked agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding, all in real time.  The UC San Diego Health project, if nothing else, has proven that in days, not months of integration work at a big provider, an AI engagement agent can give patients faster access to care, clinicians more time for care, and release a conga line of related patient facing staff to do other important work.”

An oldie but a goodie. Easy one for health librarians …

A boy is in a terrible car accident. His father is killed at the scene. The boy is rushed to hospital and taken to the operating theatre. The surgeon walks in, looks at him, and says: “I can’t operate on him — he’s my son”?

Academic medical librarians and video consultations: our new normal (2026)

Collaborative large language models (LLMs) are all you need for screening in systematic reviews (2026, preprint)

    ”collaborative approach utilizing the two best-performing models (GPT-4 & Claude-3S) achieved an average precision of 99.9% & recall of
98.5%”

AI, Automation, and the Future of Library Science Degree Careers (2026)

Thousands of paywalled research papers could be freed with this simple fix (2026, JCU librarians)

Latest issue of JMLA

    Changing minds and methods: providing health sciences faculty with alternatives to systematic reviews assignments

    Which Systematic Review Software Works Best? A Practical Comparison

        good comparison table

    bims: Biomed News (other listservs of possible interest to health librarians available on the Elist section of HLA)

        how you can create your own alert if you are particularly interested in a topic, and then others can follow it etc

    OpenEvidence

Google Vids – New (Sep 2025) / free (10 min length limit), cloud based, seems pretty easy to use  / can provide text & a pretty good AI voice will provide the voiceovers / introductory video

Research Waste, Redundancy and the Rise of the Machines: The Questionable Future of Systematic Reviews (2026)

Canadian Health Library Value Planner (2026) – available at Health Libraries – How to Demonstrate Value

Google Scholar title OR search

    allintitle:dog | cat | “insulin resistance”

OpenAi launches Prism for researchers

“Prism (free) brings together drafting, editing, citation management, equations, and collaboration in a single, cloud-based environment. Built with native LaTeX support, the platform removes the need for complex local setups while enabling researchers to focus on their work rather than tooling”

AI agents are hiring human ‘meatspace workers’ — including some scientists (2026)

” … just a few of the tasks assigned to people on RentAHuman.ai — a platform that allows people to advertise their time and talent to artificial-intelligence agents”

Open-source AI tool beats giant LLMs in literature reviews — and gets citations right (2026)

Australia introduces open science policy to expand access and collaboration in health research (2026, old news but comes into effect Jan & Feb for MRFF & NHMRC respectively)

“Academic research generates more than 6.5 million papers annually, and over 20 million datasets, each representing potential training signals for the artificial intelligence systems reshaping discovery. Yet most institutional data remains locked in formats optimized for human consumption rather than computational processing“

Are AI Tools Killing Review Articles? Two Failure Modes Suggest Otherwise (2026, Aaron Tay)

Keyboard shortcuts for Outlook (web version)  – in case of use to anyone else who prefers the web version of Outlook (may work in the program also – not sure)

(note – this is with Gmail keyboard shortcuts activated via settings (cog icon top right) > General > Accessibility > Keyboard Shortcuts > select Gmail)

Search:

category:         e.g. category:tickets   (via Label as above)

subject:           e.g. subject:iron

from:                e.g  from:juliet

Boolean:         e.g. AND OR NOT     (e.g. received:12/03/2024 AND subject:ticket)

attachments:    e.g. hasattachment:yes     attachments:*.docx

received:            e.g. received:today  “this week” “this month” “this year” 12/03/2024

to:                        e.g. to:juliet

Many of you may have heard that Cheryl Hamill is exiting stage left (today actually) after many years being a leading light in health librarianship.

Read the poem written for her – by a librarian with clearly too little work to do – and discover her most ardent parting wish …

“One in four animals on the planet earth is a beetle. Think of your three closest friends – if none of them are beetles, statistically speaking you are probably a beetle” 🪲 

New issues of JEAHIL, JCHLA (reviews of Lens, DynaMed, OpenAlex etc)

New Aaron Tay posts:

The Blank Box Problem: Why It’s Harder Than Ever to Know What to Type Into an AI Search Bar

Deep Research, Shallow Agency: What Academic Deep Research Can and Can’t Do

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers – Wiley AI Gateway & PubMed – How Claude can now pilot test search strategies using PubMed

Google Scholar Labs (ask it a natural language question and it provides a set of citations with each having a summary of the answer underneath it)

Google Scholar blog (highlights and comments now available in Scholar PDF Reader)

Interesting read – Technically Accurate, Medically Fatal : The AI Error We Caught in Real-Time

Very extensive wiki on AI compiled by a medical librarian (Dean Guistini). Scroll down to see the most visited topics, review on individual tools

Conducting Systematic Reviews in a Day: Enter Artificial Intelligence (one of the authors is from the Centre for Journalology so must be good)

“We recently introduced otto-SR (Otto Science Institute), a generative AI system for automated screening and data extraction that incorporates advanced prompting strategies and agentic LLM workflows. Data from currently unpublished studies involving benchmarking against dual human reviewers suggest that otto-SR achieved superior performance in both screening (otto-SR: 96.7% sensitivity, 97.9% specificity; human: 81.7% sensitivity, 98.1% specificity) and data extraction (otto-SR: 93.1% accuracy;  human: 79.7% accuracy) tasks. Most notably, otto-SR reproduced and updated an entire issue of the Cochrane library (12  SRs) in under 2 days*, highlighting the potential for automation to accelerate evidence synthesis and to provide decisionmakers with timely information. Across these 12 SRs, otto-SR  included nearly twice as many eligible studies as the original Cochrane authors (114 versus 64 studies)”

* “Using otto-SR, we reproduced and updated an entire issue of Cochrane reviews (n=12) in two days, representing approximately 12 work-years of traditional systematic review work“. From the preprint describing Otto

Queryome: Orchestrating Retrieval, Reasoning, and  Synthesis across Biomedical Literature

“More recently, the concept of agentic RAG has gained traction, promising more sophisticated “deep research” capabilities. Systems developed by industry leaders such as OpenAI [16], Perplexity AI [17], and Google [18] have demonstrated the ability to decompose complex questions, perform iterative searches, and synthesize more comprehensive reports. Yet, these general-purpose agentic systems are not specifically tailored for the biomedical domain … to bridge this gap, we introduce Queryome, a multi-agent deep research system designed specifically for end-to-end biomedical literature analysis. Queryome orchestrates a hierarchy of collaborating AI agents that perform iterative, multi-faceted searches against a curated, comprehensive search engine covering the entirety of PubMed [1]. Crucially, the  system is engineered to reason over abstract text of every retrieved article, ensuring that its  final synthesis is deeply grounded in the available evidence”

Available as an app for Windows & MacOS

Instats videos – quite a few are free (using Filters (top right) > Sort by > Free. Many are quite technical but there are a number on research, using statistical tools (R, Python etc). An upcoming one is AI Tools for Research 2.0 (requires free registration, can be watched later)

Previously mentioned the many useful ebooks available via Open Educational Resources (OER) but difficulty in keeping track on new ebooks available. You can sign up to receive updates here

Spotted in the Fin Review re terrible corporate jargon – being “Promoted Outwards” is “not about job cuts but giving employees the opportunity to embrace new challenges outside the organisation”

TRIP Mind Maps live / Video introduction

Amusing PubMed article

The second round of the MLA UX Caucus Lightning Talks are now available on the HLA Videos page

A number of Ovid / PubMed search-related presentations which could be of interest

(Underneath this is the TERA overview by Justin Clark – worth a watch if haven’t seen it yet)

Speaking of MLA, they have quite a few free PD courses available (potentially useful for the Health Professional Development Scheme, or just to become more librarianish)

Firmly in the “work smarter, not harder” camp – a library’s change from EZProxy to Open Athens resulted in a huge number of dead links. They were fixing these manually one by one, over two years until  …. (article title gives it away)

174,000+ Links Dead in an Instant: How a Recent Library School Graduate Brought the Dead Back to Life