What’s it all about?

 As you may already know, Elsevier is the largest publisher of Medical, Dentistry, Nursing and Allied Health titles in the world today. We publish books and electronic resources under the imprints which include Mosby, Churchill Livingstone, Saunders and Butterworth-Heinemann to name a few.

As a student representative (or “rep”) you will be able to get directly involved in the whole of the publishing process – from early project development right through to spreading the word about new titles on publication. The programme is designed to enable us to better understand your course trends and your textbook and courseware needs, as well as those of your lecturers and course directors. With your co-operation and feedback we hope to get a better idea of which products you like, which you don’t and how you think things could be improved in the future. After all you are the people who are using the books! It also gives us a better indication of how we might get closer to your institution community through events and activities for which our support/involvement may be appropriate.

What’s the deal?
The Student Rep Programme is designed to help you specifically with your studies as well as being of benefit to Elsevier. The minimum commitment we ask is a few hours of your time each academic year and in return you will receive your choice of FREE textbooks from our extensive list of publications up to the value of £50. There is also opportunity to earn extra points (which can also be converted into books) on a monthly basis through responding to ‘Tasks’ sent via our monthly email communication and by doing additional activities such as focus groups, writing book reviews, generating word of mouth etc. But that’s not all, we are always open to suggestions and new ideas and really encourage innovation in the scheme so feel free to come to us with your idea’s no matter how outlandish that may seem! Also, perhaps you would be interested in seeing what we do, student reps have had the opportunity to take part in research, focus group events and present at Elsevier sales conferences. We are also happy to provide a letter for your portfolio to outline your involvement with the scheme.

What do I have to do?

To get your first 50 points you need to:
Send us your recommended reading list for this year
Fill in a questionnaire about your university and course
Put up posters and hand out catalogues/flyers

You can also earn extra points by organising other activities

How do I claim my books?

Each quarter you will be sent a statement via email telling you how many points you have earned, you can then make your book selection and send it to d.watkins@elsevier.com and your books will be posted out to you.

Who will be my contact?
Your main contact will be in the Elsevier Marketing Department, is Debs Watkins and you can contec Debs at: d.watkins@elsevier.com, you will also get to know the Elsevier Sales Representative for your institution who will also be in contact with you.

Terms & Conditions

Elsevier reserve the right not to send all the free books in the case of no contribution from a student representative and discontinue the relationship at any point.

The year is from January to December – all points must be claimed in the year they are earned, any points left over at the end of the academic year will be lost.

The maximum points that can be earned in one year is 150, the £50 worth of books given on completion of part on is considered separate from any other points earnings

You cannot combine cash with points so the value of the books you request has to be equal too or less than the number of points you have accrued. You can only claim your books on a quarterly basis, you can carry points over during the year.

Tasks cannot be started without the permission of your Elsevier contact. No points will be given for tasks carried out with out the agreement of Elsevier.

By sending us your book reviews you are consenting to allow any part of it to be used in promotional material.

Commentary on the Internet is notoriously stupid. Pick pretty much any Youtube video and you will see questions being asked about the content which is clearly answered in the description on the right-hand side, or at best a simple Google away. And then asked again. And then asked again. Or you may encounter trolling in its most basic form, where people sitting in front of computer screens freed from their built-in social constraints of politeness and fear of reprisals unleash pure vitriol in the form of typing before they’ve had any time to think. People’s genuine opinions approach sheer ridiculousness in these situations. Indeed, Poe’s Law of the Internet states that “Without a winking smily or other blatant display of humour it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. “Speak you’re branes” is a good example of a blog (there are others) which is dedicated to offering up the prime cuts of un-thought-through commentary from the dregs of the Internet.

Billed as the ‘easiest food diary’ you’ll ever keep, Tweet What You Eat aims to make it simple^. It is notoriously difficult for patients to remember to take their tablets. Having been a participant in a clinical trial before I realise this. It must be even harder if you have to keep track of what you eat without a dedicated nurse there to do it for you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant and openness is essential for transparency. From a trial diary of what you have been doing, it is not possible to see if entries have been made days after when patients may have ‘forgotten’ or indeed genuinely forgotten what they have eaten. It is not possible to edit what has already been posted on Twitter unless you are some kind of super hacker. Once information is there, it is there, and in the public domain. Although looking at what people are eating at the moment, I don’t feel that encouraged…

I never really appreciated the full use of the many of the add-on tools that can be used in conjunction with PubMed. PubMed remains more reliable than Google Scholar and all other pretenders to its throne as the best place to look for papers i.e. it’s the gold standard for finding medical research and hence for making evidence-based decisions. However, although it contains all that the most brilliant academics and the most cutting-edge consultants in the world know, it has not always been easy to find this information. It comes equipped with online training, which I do find myself coming back to now and again. Ben Goldacre has published a very quick guide to using Hubmed, which I did not really understand before. It is reasonably simple to use PubMed by itself to create RSS feeds from customised searches, but it seems to make a lot more sense with HubMed. If nothing else, it is a less forbidding front-end to the sum of human knowledge.

JANE stands for Journal/Author Name Estimator. It is one of a series of novel tools coming online to help researchers get their work published. Its primary use is to find which journals are most likely to publish work, so is aimed at a researcher holding a completed manuscript, or nearly completed manuscript and aiming to have it published in a journal. The primary use is typing in keywords, then a list of appropriate journals will be listed alongside. There are additional options which can be completed. The Biosemantics Group is the result of a collaboration between two Dutch universities: Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University Medical Center. Work besides JANE done by the group includes the EU-ADR project to create a Europe-wide system to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and INFOBIOMED to look at synergy between bioinformatics and medical informatics at a European level. Medical informatics describes use of information technology in medicine, and bioinformatics describes use of information technology in molecular biology, so really this is related to the use of IT in Medicine, which is only going to increase in coming years.

Rivka a French student living just outside Paris is looking to flat swap with a London student in a few months time. If this intereste you you can get in touch with Rivka here: desimeur.rivka@laposte.net

These pictures were forwarded to us by Professor Kumar herself. I’d give 10 out of 10 for effort to these fantastically creative med students from Sheffield: Emily & Teja who recreated Kumar & Clark 6/e with just a few bits of cardboard, a couple of felt tipped pens and some sticky backed plastic. Amazing effort ladies, just look at that detail. If anyone has similar homages to any of our books please feel free to send into d.watkins@elsevier.com . Also if you want to let us know how you feel about K & C don’t forget that you can let us know here

Hello all,

We thought that you might be interested in a podcasted chapter from Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine 7/e that has been created for us very kindly by Ed Wallitt at podmedics . The chapter is on Multiple Sclerosis click here to enjoy

Until now songs about swine flu had focused on the effects of the illness itself. The balance has now been redressed by a song talking about the side-effects of the treatment. This is not a vaccine. One paper in the Lancet is titled “Possible harms of oseltamivir – a call for urgent action”. Due to unexpectedly good containment of swine flu, various government subsequently downgraded their orders of oseltamivir and the developed swine flu vaccine. It seems that six people must be treated for one of these people to reduce their change of becoming infected with swine flu, but more than of these people will have side effects. The swine flu vaccine was quite quickly developed, and can safely be given at the same time as the seasonal flu vaccine. Although it does seem to have produced more side-effects, which reports of some flul-like symptoms and pain in the arm.

Poems begin each

Issue of JAMA, which is

An uncommon start.

Not always great but

Doesn’t mean health poems

Can’t inspire doctors.

Winners of a contest

Of online haikus are

Found by clicking here.