Category Archives: Internet Resources

Prepare with BoardVitals

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Need to practice for your board exams? Consider using BoardVitals, an effective and powerful board review tool that includes high-quality review questions. With BoardVitals, users may prepare for a variety of board examinations, including the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1, Step 2 (CK and CS), and Step 3, as well as the National Council Licensure Examination for registered nurses (NCLEX-RN). The resource allows for decreased study time, with everything organized under one platform and the best questions to study listed up front.
Eligible users include UT Southwestern faculty, staff, students, residents/fellows, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners. Users will need to register for a new account using their @utsouthwestern.edu email address as their username. Once the account is set up, users may create customized practice tests using many options including number or questions, subjects and more. Also included are detailed, up-to-date explanations with each answer, with references and links to applicable sources.

PubMed Central Article Datasets available via ODP cloud

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) recently announced that two PubMed Central article datasets are openly available via Open Data Sponsorship Program (ODP). This benefits researchers utilizing text mining methodology or other types of secondary analysis.


PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature from the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). For nearly two decades NLM has supported the retrieval and download of machine-readable open access journal articles through the PMC Open Archives Initiative (PMC-OAI) and FTP (file transfer protocol). To enhance access, these datasets are now also available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Registry of Open Data as part of AWS’s Open Data Sponsorship Program (ODP). Benefits to working with the datasets in the cloud include access to uncompressed individual full-text article files in XML and plain text as well as faster download and transfer speeds.


PMC Article Datasets housed on the AWS include:

  • The PMC Open Access (OA) Subset includes all articles and preprints in PMC with a machine-readable Creative Commons license that allows reuse.
  • The Author Manuscript Dataset includes accepted author manuscripts collected under a funder policy in PMC and made available in machine-readable formats for text mining.

Full details of the datasets are available on the PMC Article Datasets page.Getting started documentation for using the datasets is available via AWS. Direct questions or concerns regarding the datasets to pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.