Levy Library Blog

Bulk, or systematic, downloading is the process of manually or programmatically downloading all or large amounts of publications from a site, whether a publishers’ site or database of content. Publications are systematically downloaded regardless of relevancy to one’s own research in order to amass a publication “library.”

Bulk downloading is usually done by programming a script to “crawl” sites for content like online articles and eBooks. Our licenses with journal publishers and other vendors prohibit bulk downloading. When vendors detect this activity, they will cut off access to specific resources, which can affect the research activities for everyone at Mount Sinai.

We actively monitor for excessively high publication download rates. Aside from not bulk downloading, the biggest step you can take to make sure that library resources remain secure and accessible for everyone, is to never share your login credentials (username/password) with anyone. Hackers can use this data to bulk download content to pirate sites, resulted in vulnerability to computer viruses.

Learn more about our Levy Library licensing and copyright policies here. If you have questions related to bulk downloading, please contact us via our Ask a Librarian service.

On Wednesday, June 21 & Thursday, June 22, Robin O’Hanlon, our Assistant Library Director of Outreach & Public Services, provided two education sessions to 27 students participating in an internship at the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center. The interns came from undergraduate institutions across NYC to work as field coordinators training public high school students as part of a community mapping initiative. Course topics included effective PubMed & Google Scholar searching, reference management, finding statistics & datasets, creating research posters, and more. The community mapping project is a part of the Building Healthy Communities initiative, a joint effort of the Mayor’s Office and the Fund for Public Health of New York.

On Friday, June 9, students from Hostos Community College in the South Bronx visited Levy Library and Icahn School of Medicine as part of a summer research seminar. This is the second year the Levy Library has hosted the Hostos students, and this cohort represented a diversity of interests including humanities, nursing, and science. The aim of this program is to give them in-depth exposure to a sophisticated research environment.

The students visited the lab of Dr. Joy Reidenberg who gave us an inside tour of her specimens and her dissection table.

They met with Dr. Emma Benn, who discussed her experiences as a graduate student, researcher, and faculty member at Mount Sinai.

Students also met with Amy Zhong and Christopher Smith, representatives from the Instructional Technology Group, who offered overviews on medical illustration and instructional design.

To top it all off, Robin O’Hanlon, Levy Library’s Assistant Library Director of Outreach and Public Services, gave a short presentation on getting started with health sciences research.

Here’s what the students had to say about the experience:

“Everyone that spoke to our group on Friday shared one thing in common. They all attended school, not knowing that this is where they will end up and they all seem extremely satisfied and passionate about their career. That inspires me and gives me hope that no matter what, I will end up exactly where I am meant to be in my career.”

“…the trip to Mt. Sinai and the people we met was very meaningful to me and I keep realizing how many professions exist that I really have never encountered, I suppose these people have all followed their passions and in some cases even carved out their own path in the professional world.”

“Last we saw a presentation by medical illustrators which is a way of merging science with art with helpful application. I immediately thought of my daughter Rebeccah because she loves to draw and even though Rebeccah says she wants to be an artist and a coroner, I am not sure she has the stomach to handle the smell of the dead, so when I got home I shared with her this fantastic field I have just come to know  exists…”

“What I enjoyed the most was how Joy was explaining the reasons why she does this type of research. Her purpose, at the end of the day, is to improve the lives of individuals by helping them live longer and healthier lives.”

Thank you to everyone who made this visit a success!

Robin O’Hanlon, our Assistant Library Director of Outreach & Public Services, was interviewed by Emily Couvillon on how libraries can adapt content marketing practices into successful library outreach initiatives. The full conversation can be found here.

Each month the Levy Library showcases the achievements of Mount Sinai faculty and researchers by highlighting an article and its altmetrics. Altmetrics are alternative measures of impact that capture non-traditional data like abstract views, article downloads, and social media activity.

This month we highlight the article written by a team of researchers including Mount Sinai’s Dr. Alison M Goate, DPhil, Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Neurology, and Genetics & Genomic Sciences.

Citation: Desikan RS, Fan CC, Wang Y, et al. Genetic assessment of age-associated Alzheimer disease risk: Development and validation of a polygenic hazard score. PLOS Medicine. 2017;14(3).

Summary:

Late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia across the United States. There is a strong need for in vivo markers for AD risk stratification and cohort enrichment in therapeutic trials. Although numerous studies have identified several genetic risk factors, genetic variants have not been integrated with genetic epidemiology for quantifying age of AD onset. Using genotype data from over 70,000 AD patients and normal elderly controls, researchers evaluated the feasibility of combining AD-associated SNPs and APOE status into a continuous measure—a polygenic hazard score (PHS)—for predicting the age-specific risk for developing AD.

Full Abstract:

Background: Identifying individuals at risk for developing Alzheimer disease (AD) is of utmost importance. Although genetic studies have identified AD-associated SNPs in APOE and other genes, genetic information has not been integrated into an epidemiological framework for risk prediction.

Methods: Using genotype data from 17,008 AD cases and 37,154 controls from the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP Stage 1), we identified AD-associated SNPs (at p < 10−5). We then integrated these AD-associated SNPs into a Cox proportional hazard model using genotype data from a subset of 6,409 AD patients and 9,386 older controls from Phase 1 of the Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC), providing a polygenic hazard score (PHS) for each participant. By combining population-based incidence rates and the genotype-derived PHS for each individual, we derived estimates of instantaneous risk for developing AD, based on genotype and age, and tested replication in multiple independent cohorts (ADGC Phase 2, National Institute on Aging Alzheimer’s Disease Center [NIA ADC], and Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative [ADNI], total n = 20,680). Within the ADGC Phase 1 cohort, individuals in the highest PHS quartile developed AD at a considerably lower age and had the highest yearly AD incidence rate. Among APOE ε3/3 individuals, the PHS modified expected age of AD onset by more than 10 y between the lowest and highest deciles (hazard ratio 3.34, 95% CI 2.62–4.24, p = 1.0 × 10−22). In independent cohorts, the PHS strongly predicted empirical age of AD onset (ADGC Phase 2, r = 0.90, p = 1.1 × 10−26) and longitudinal progression from normal aging to AD (NIA ADC, Cochran–Armitage trend test, p = 1.5 × 10−10), and was associated with neuropathology (NIA ADC, Braak stage of neurofibrillary tangles, p = 3.9 × 10−6, and Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease score for neuritic plaques, p = 6.8 × 10−6) and in vivo markers of AD neurodegeneration (ADNI, volume loss within the entorhinal cortex, p = 6.3 × 10−6, and hippocampus, p = 7.9 × 10−5). Additional prospective validation of these results in non-US, non-white, and prospective community-based cohorts is necessary before clinical use.

Conclusions: We have developed a PHS for quantifying individual differences in age-specific genetic risk for AD. Within the cohorts studied here, polygenic architecture plays an important role in modifying AD risk beyond APOE. With thorough validation, quantification of inherited genetic variation may prove useful for stratifying AD risk and as an enrichment strategy in therapeutic trials.

View the article on PlumX

View Dr. Goate’s profile on PlumX 

Congratulations to Robin O’Hanlon, our Assistant Library Director of Outreach & Public Service, for being named the 2017 recipient of the Medical Library Association’s Ysabel Bertolucci Grant. The annual grant recognizes a health sciences librarian involved in nursing, allied health, consumer health or international librarianship. Robin’s sustained commitment to consumer health advocacy both inside and out of the Levy Library is a continual source of inspiration. Below you will find some photographs from the MLA President’s Awards Dinner Ceremony.