Tuesday 18 March 2008

Electronic journals - gains and losses

The tangled mess of cables illustrating this entry reflects the slight complexity of the situation regarding electronic journals. As librarians you can be confident that our cables are much tidier than these and we will be doing our best to ensure that the changes to your electronic journals are as free from complication as possible.

With effect from 1st of April you will have access to the following (using your Athens username - register from any NHS computer):

All the journal titles published by BMJ Publishing Group so

SPECIALIST titles
Heart
Gut
Thorax
Journal of Clinical Pathology
Journal of Medical Ethics
Journal of Medical Genetics
Postgraduate Medical Journal
Quality and Safety in Health Care
Sexually Transmitted Infections
Archives of Disease in Childhood
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
British Journal of Ophthalmology
British Journal of Sports Medicine
Emergency Medicine Journal
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry

EVIDENCE BASED titles
Evidence -Based Medicine
Evidence-Based Mental Health
Evidence-Based Nursing

PUBLIC HEALTH titles
Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
Injury Prevention
Tobacco Control

All the titles from the American Medical Association series

JAMA
Archives of Dermatology
Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery
Archives of General Psychiatry
Archives of Internal Medicine
Archives of Neurology
Archives of Opthalmology
Archives of Otolaryngology
Archives of Pediatrics
Archives of Surgery

Some 559 titles in the CINAHL full text collection. Going into these in detail is probably beyond your current needs but the curious can access this full listing (be aware that this includes all titles included in CINAHL - check the full text column for coverage). CINAHL covers nursing and allied health literature so this should be an improvement on our current electronic holdings in these areas.

We are also going to be using a system called a Link Resolver to enable us to include more of the articles now made available on the Internet (more on this at a later date).

So what are we losing? At the time of writing this is not entirely clear. NHS London has in the past clubbed together to improve the selection available. We are hopeful that this will happen again. More detail will be published as soon as we have it.

So how will this all work in practice? Hopefully - other than not finding quite the same titles you should find your experience unchanged. All the available titles will continue to be listed on MyJournals (remember to login with Athens to see everything). You will still find links to the articles direct from your results when you search Medline or other literature databases. If you get stuck just contact us.

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