Navigating across medicine's electronic landscape, stopping at places with Pub or Central in their names
BMJ 2001; 323 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7321.1120 (Published 10 November 2001) Cite this as: BMJ 2001;323:1120
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When publishing a paper you can be charged in the thousands of
dollars to get a paper published with color figures. A personal
subscription to the journal is hundreds of dollars, an institutional
subscription could be thousands of dollars, and an online reprint could be
35 dollars or more.
Access to research which is supposed to better life quality, develop
drugs and possibly lead to treatments to disease is expensive. The
publishers are making large profits and keep coming out with new journals.
Much of this research was paid for by government and industry grants. The
research should be accessible.
Maybe authors should copyright their own work and sell it to the
journals if they will not allow free access online through services like
PubMed? If the publishers have no papers to publish they are out of
business.
If you are in a particular field and everytime you search and the
papers you need are all coming from one journal, you are likely to
subscribe to it. The publishers should see this as an opportunity to
expose more people to more of their journals. Have journal subscriptions
really gone down since papers have been available online? As for myself, I
subscribe to more journals now than in the past.
Ken Clune
Competing interests: No competing interests
It is understandable that there is a focus on Medline via PubMed as
it is free and one of the major databases.
Medline may be enough for a general search, but for a comprehensive
search or one outside the mainstream clinical field, there is often a need
to search in other databases too. Which ones depends on what you subject
area you are looking for, how much time you have,and whether you can
access databases which charge. My work involves both free enquiries and an
online search service with access to a wide range of databases, for a fee.
For the effectiveness of therapies,there is the Cochrane Database of
Systematic Reviews, free to NHS staff via NeLH (abstracts free to
everyone)<http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/> and the related DARE,NHS EED and
HTA databases (free to all)<http://agatha.york.ac.uk/welcome.htm>.
The Research Findings Register may also be worth checking (free to all via
NeLH)
There is a range of other databases available free in particular
areas. For example, in toxicology there is the the Hazardous Substances
Databank and Toxline via Toxnet <http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/>.
HealthPromis <http://healthpromis.hea.org.uk/> has databases
relevant to UK health promotion.
Other major databases do not receive the UK or US government support
to make them free, which means there are budget and purchasing decisions
for the individual, their library or professional association. Several
hosts provide access- see DIALOG's pages for some idea of the huge range
of databases <http://library.dialog.com/essentials.html>
Embase includes more European and pharmacology journals, in addition
to being likely to index articles more rapidly (Premedline in PubMed adds
references quickly but they are not indexed). There are several other
(usually expensive) databases in pharmaceutical development eg
Pharmaprojects.
PsychINFO (various names) gives better coverage than Medline of
academic psychology. AMED gives additional coverage of the separate areas
of palliative care, professions allied to medicine (the CSP offers it free
to member physiotherapists),and complementary medicine.
DHSS-Data covers English/UK hospital and health administration (in
addition to the large amount free on the DoH website).
'Web of Science' gives access to the Science, Social Science and Arts
and Humanities Citation Indexes, which can also be searched separately on
other hosts. This means you can track who has cited a particular
article,as well as the citations in that article. Its coverage is broad,
but consequently less in-depth for any particular subject than a more
specific database.
NHS staff should keep an eye on what is available via the 'knowledge'
section of NeLH. For example, zetoc (free to NHS staff in England and many
in UK higher education) is another general database, covering a large
number of journals and conference proceedings in all subjects.You can also
set up to be emailed tables of
contents.<http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/zetoc.asp> However, its usefulness
is limited by the fact that it does not have abstracts or indexing.
And so it goes on- these are just some major examples. The main
message is, if you are doing a comprehensive search, or haven't found what
you need in Medline, check with your medical librarian if there are other
databases you could use.
Its also worth checking with them about how to search effectively -
there are a lot of useful features in PubMed but they are not intuitive.
There are also links to some further information and training materials at
<http://www.bl.uk/services/stb/blmedline.html>
Fiona McLean
fiona.mclean@bl.uk
Competing interests:
search service <http://www.bl.uk/services/stb/stms.html>)
and the British Library produces AMED
<http://www.bl.uk/services/stb/amed.html> and zetoc.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Tony Delamothe's article concentrates on "places with Pub or
Central in the title? and neglects the fact that there are other
databases altogether.
He writes "Research journals that want to be taken seriously need to
appear in PubMed."
Neither the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society nor
Biometrika appear to be indexed by Medline but both of these journals
are taken seriously and regularly publish material of relevance to
medicine. I don't know whether this situation arises in other areas which
overlap with medicine but readers should be aware that reliance on one
database may be insufficient. They might, for example, miss the
forthcoming paper by Spiegelhalter and colleagues about statistical
analysis for the Bristol inquiry.
I do not suggest that other databases are without problems (the
policies of Science Citation Index are not always as clear as might be
thought) but it would be useful if the BMJ were to review the variety of
bibliographic sources, including Web of Science (which accesses the
whole of science) and Embase rather than supporting the view that
Medline/Pubmed is the only one.
How this variety fits into plans for one central database is another
matter which seems to have been overlooked.
Competing interests: No competing interests
I would like to bring your readers attention to the recent deal
struck between the World Health Organization and six of the leading
publishers to make available over 1000 publications to developing
countries, either free or heavily discounted. This agreement supports the
'Health InterNetwork' project that aims to provide access, connectivity
and capacity building. The project is led by WHO and includes many UN and
other agencies.
I regard this agreement a breakthrough in bringing current scientific
thought to the developing world and the needs and priorities of the
developing world as well as local research to us in the developed world.
This can only lead to better understanding between nations and
communities. A quality that is needed now more than ever.
The Health InterNetwork was reported in health Informatics Europe at
http://hi-europe.co.uk/files/2001/9983.htm
Regards.
Ahmad Risk
Competing interests: No competing interests
half way there, Ken
Ken Clune has got half way there.
Authors should publish their work on their website.
Indexing becomes the challenge then.
Over to the librarians. And Google.
Competing interests: No competing interests