Changes to how electronic journal articles are indexed

PubMed has announced that MEDLINE records would in many cases now refer to the online, electronic versions of journals rather than the print version. This reflects the fact that many publishers now deem the ejournal as the version of record with complete content for each issue. More about PubMed practice here

In parallel with this development, publishers such as BMJ have dropped traditional date - volume - part - page pagination in references and replaced it with a new method where the electronic article is given a unique number instead of page numbers.

BMJ references in in PubMed now look like this:

Should antihistamines be used to treat anaphylaxis?
Andreae DA, Andreae MH.
BMJ. 2009 Jul 10;339:b2489. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b2489.

The date (Jul 10) and volume (339) format remains the same but the article reference is now to " b2489 " a number unique to this article in this issue. Also referenced is the doi or digital object identifier, a unique string which enables a digital object to be searched and found on the internet.


Paul

Web of Science

Web of Science
Citation Indexes and Journal Citation Reports

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary journal index comprising Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. It includes 10,000 + journals and there are more journals indexed and more disciplines covered than Medline, especially in:

• Biomedicine
• Biotechnology
• Chemistry
• Social sciences
• Health services
• Healthcare management
• Pharmacology

More content than Medline with meeting abstracts and conference papers and these unique search features:

• Find all citations to a known paper or author
• Calculate citations for an author or a paper
• Show impact measures for an author, paper or institution
• Find an author’s h-Index

You can track from any one research article or any one author all those other researchers who have subsequently cited that work in other papers. Thus networks and clusters of research activity can be traced through following citations. The citation databases provide the basis for the calculation of the impact factors for biomedical journals worldwide. Also included is Journal Citation Reports, which gives the Impact Factors for all Web of Science journals in science and the social sciences.

Full download (including EndNote), personalized alert features, help and tutorials. Connect from the library’s web page at http://www.rcsi.ie/library/databases

Funded for RCSI by SFI and delivered via IReL

Paul