Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library
UNMC_Acronym_Vert_sm_4c
University of Nebraska Medical Center

McGoogan News

Update to Campus Lighting System Scheduled

From 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5 through 1 a.m. Thursday, March 6, facilities will be updating the campus lighting system. This update may cause lighting controls to not be available, lights may turn on or off, go to full brightness, or gently flash as the system reboots. This update will only affect lighting. No power outlets, equipment, etc. will be affected by this upgrade. 

Thank you for your understanding.

Fiscal Year 2024 Library Annual Report Released

The Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library is excited to share its 2023-2024 annual report, showcasing the library’s work in connecting the past, shaping the present, and building a bright future. Through its efforts, McGoogan Library supports excellence in education, research and patient care by providing access to valuable information. 

View the interactive online report. 

In her message to readers, McGoogan Library Dean, Emily Glenn, shares that the library “is a very special place—a campus hub and welcoming space, a sharer of rich UNMC and health sciences history, a facilitator of access to high-quality collections for learners and educators, and home for faculty who instruct on information literacies.” 

McGoogan Library, one of the nation’s major health science libraries, serves the information needs of UNMC students, faculty, and staff, as well as licensed Nebraska health professionals and residents of the state. 

Services, resources and additional information about the library can be found on the library’s website. 

View previous McGoogan Library annual reports. 

New Open Access APC Discounts

Thanks to the work of the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries (UNCL), new Open Access discounts are available for the UNMC community. The Royal Society of Chemistry journals and American Society for Microbiology (ASM) hybrid journals are the newest additions to the OA publishing list. Articles must have been accepted January 2025 or after. Learn more about activating the discount.  

For questions regarding these agreements, email Heather Brown, McGoogan Library’s scholarly communications librarian. 

About Open Access at UNMC

Since 2023, nearly 200 articles have been published under these agreements, saving the university hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

McGoogan Library supports Open Access (OA) publishing at UNMC through participation in agreements with a number of scholarly publishers, enabling UNMC authors to publish their articles as open access in selected journals at no cost to themselves, or at a discounted fee. 

  • Royal Society of Chemistry (new addition) 
  • American Society for Microbiology (new addition) 
  • Wiley and Hindawi 
  • Elsevier 
  • Biochemical Society 
  • Cambridge University Press 

The library subscribes to journals from publishers who provide discounts that are available to UNMC through membership in the University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries. McGoogan Library does not pay for article processing charges, or any other fees charged to authors. 

A recent study in Scientometrics shows that open access articles receive higher citation rates and from a wider range of audiences. In addition, the study also noted that, “Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms.”  

Learn more about the university’s institutional repository, DigitalCommons@UNMC, below. 

DigitalCommons@UNMC an Institutional Repository

To further assist in open access strategies, the library provides an open platform that hosts a variety of scholarly outputs, such as conference posters and presentations, preprints, white papers and reports, research instruments, images, and video. 

DigitalCommons@UNMC is an institutional repository founded on the tenant of open access and in support of UNMC’s strategic vision to “Increase the research scope and prominence of UNMC as a top tier academic health sciences center” by providing online access to faculty, staff, and student scholarship.  

Open access principles are central to the design of this repository, which breaks down financial barriers to education and also increases the impact of the work contained within it by showcasing it to the global community. It likewise hosts three UNMC based professional journals which provide a platform for UNMC and global authors. 

Library to Launch Internship Program

McGoogan Library is launching an internship program starting summer 2025. Students will embed with faculty in the Robert S. Wigton Department of Special Collections and Archives between 10-20 hours per week. The internship program is open to enrolled undergraduate and graduate students. Internship roles pay $14 per hour. No prior experience is required. 

Are you interested in health care, health humanities, public history, or working in libraries, archives, or museums? Discover the opportunities available. Be sure to share with the students in your life who may be interested. 

Already have summer plans? McGoogan Library accepts applications on a rolling basis. Learn more about internship dates, how to apply and the types of experiences available. 

AI Hallucinations with Citations

It is becoming increasingly common for researchers to turn to generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT to help them with their projects. While tools like ChatGPT certainly have their uses, they are not good for finding sources for your articles or essays. In fact, a recent study explored the two latest versions of ChatGPT. The authors found that of the articles generated by GPT-3.5, 98.1% of them were fabricated. GPT-4 is better at finding sources, but 20.6% of the articles it generated were determined to be fake.

When generative AI sites generate/produce inaccurate or false information responses, the responses are called “hallucinations.” Chatbots hallucinate for a few reasons: the data the models train on may be biased or incomplete, plus they are predictive and generate new content. However, there are safeguards to verify accuracy.

Chatbots tend to hallucinate citations in various ways. It could entirely fabricate a citation including author, article title and journal. Or perhaps it will use a journal title known for content on a subject and generate a fake article that would be credible for that journal. Or it might take an author known to be an expert in that field and hallucinate an article under their name.

Fortunately, there are ways to tell if a source produced by ChatGPT or another chatbot is fabricated. You can search for the article title with quotes around it in Google or Google Scholar and see if you can find it. You can also look for the journal title and see if the citation matches the volume, issue, and page numbers for the journal. Alternatively, you could do an internet search for the article’s author and see if you can find a publication list.

ChatGPT may not be great for finding sources, but it can be helpful for generating keywords for your topic that you can then use in one of the library’s many literature databases. Chatbots can also help with grammar or sentence structure, much like the Writing Center @ UNMC. Don’t forget that McGoogan liaison librarians are here to help you find the sources you need for your research. If you need help, schedule a meeting with an Education & Research Librarian or email AskUs.

Blog Author
Katie Bishop, Associate Dean

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