| | Medical Library News and Events for Fall 2026
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It is August 2026 and we are excited to welcome a new cohort to OUWB - Welcome Class of 2030! That is a strange number to look at. In this quarter's newsletter you can find invites to some of our upcoming events, OUWB publications, and some valuable resources for your upcoming year.
This month's newletter features:
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| Medical Library Resources for the M1 Year
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Whether you're an M1 getting your feet wet or an M2 looking to enhance your research skills, we have what you need. This is a glimpse of what's in store this coming year at your medical library.
For M1s - getting oriented
- Study Spaces: Collaborative study room (with two breakout rooms), 8 individual study rooms, and a silent study room with 30 carrels
- Mobile Apps: Point-of-care tools, drug/interaction checkers, medical calculators, and patient education apps, all available for your mobile devices
- Course Guides: Look through the Course Guides for your M1 classes - your one-stop shop to every resource you'll need or want for any given course
- Ask a Librarian: Have a question about a resource, a literature search, or access to a journal? Use our Ask a Librarian form to send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
For M2s - leveling up research & clinical skills
- Research and Clinical Reference Tools: AccessMedicine, ClinicalKey, DynaMed, VisualDX, Micromedex,and UpToDate, plus core databases like PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science
- Evidence-Based Medicine Course Guide: the library's EBM guide walks through generating a clinical question, finding the best evidence, critical appraisal, and applying it in practice
- Research Consultations: Get help with literature searches, grant/funding searches, NIH Biosketch tools, and copyright/plagiarism questions
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| Medical Library Open House
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Join us for our 2026 Medical Library Open House. Whether you're a new M1 finding your way around the library or a returning student curious about what's changed, stop by! You can enjoy complimentary lunch, a trivia contest, giveaways, and mingling with OUWB faculty, students, and staff. Please register below so we can provide adequate repast!
October 29th, 2026 | 11:30-1p | Medical Library Collaborative Study Room
RSVP: https://libcal.oakland.edu/event/17264934
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Kick off the year by exploring the medical library in a fun way. Participants will race to find key spots both on site and online ( spots that I will not spoil here) and climb the leaderboard in friendly competition. Check out the official website for all the details (limited to medical students only - sorry professors!).
When: August 25 - October 6
How to join: https://medlib.oakland.edu/scavenger/
The Prize: Your very own copy of First Aid USMLE 2026!
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| OUWB Publication Highlights - 3rd Quarter
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With so many OUWB faculty, staff, and student publications being published every year, we thought we could provide a place to showcase a few with our newsletter. Below you will find a very small sample of what our OUWB community has been researching. If you would like to have your own publication featured in the Medical Library Newsletter, please contact us, and we can make it happen!
Dr. Abram Brummett - Foundational Medical Studies: Bioethics Makes Strange Bedfellows: A Discussion with Our Colleagues About Institutional Conscience and Neurologically Devastated Patients, published in The American Journal of Bioethics in September 2026
Nicolas Belair - Class of 2027: Analysis of inactive ingredients and potential allergens in topical corticosteroid formulations, published in Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology in July 2026
Dr. Barry Franklin - Department of Internal Medicine: Low Vo2peak: An Underappreciated Metric in Predicting Future Chronic Disease, Cardiovascular Events, and Heightened Mortality published in JACC: Asia in August 2026
Print copies (or citation printouts, where full text isn't available) are featured this month in the collaborative study space at the library. Stop by to see your peers' and faculty's work in person!
Know of a recent publication we missed? Let us know for the next issue.
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| David's AI Corner - The Risk of "Never-Skilling"
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Our M1 class is starting medical school at a strange moment: they have an AI chatbot in their pocket before they've built a differential diagnosis. That's a genuinely new situation for medical training, and it's given rise to a new term worth knowing - "never-skilling." Unlike burning out on a skill they already have, this describes something quieter: never building the skill at all because the tool was always there to shortcut it. A wrong AI suggestion is arguably worse than no suggestion at all since it's much easier to accept a confident-sounding answer than to notice a gap in your own reasoning.
Whether this is a real threat or just the newest version of an old panic (people said the same about calculators and electronic medical records) is unclear, but it is worth thinking about and being aware of the potential danger. One reasonable middle ground floating around education circles is to use AI to check your reasoning after you've worked through a case yourself, not before. That way the technology tests your thinking instead of replacing it. But even that runs the risk of practioners second-guessing themselves. "Did I get it wrong? Or is the AI at fault?"
One solution is to obviously ignore AI entirely, then one never runs the risk of it thinking for them. Students will not have to worry about never-skilling because they will naturally build the skills as medical students have always done. But medical school is hard - how could one pass up an opportunity to use a tool that is as efficient and useful as AI? Sorry folks. I don't have the answers. I'm just here to pose difficult questions!
Have a strong opinion on this? We'd love to run a response in next month's issue - email davidstewart@oakland.edu
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