Electronic resources are not just about databases and e-journals anymore. They are also about e-books, Clinical Summaries and the RCSI Institutional Repository which provide more access to academic literature, peer-reviewed summaries for healthcare contexts for both students and professionals. Institutional Repositories host all of the research outputs of RCSI staff and students and Beaumont Hospital.
So put your digital skills to good use and check out these resources:
E-Books of all shapes and sizes
Armed with even a few digital skills, anyone can search the RCSI Library Catalogue for that elusive hard copy of a book, which may always seem to be “not on the shelf”, “on loan” or in “another location”.
Or sometimes you could be at home and you forgot to ask the library staff. Go explore your library online. Or you could simply ring or email the library service desk and extract/drain the info from the library staff!
Why not check out the e-book collection for that all important book you need?
All it takes to find an e-book is to:
Go to the library catalogue
Change the search filter to e-book Collection Catalogue (you can also find ebooks without this step, but this method ensures your search results will show e-books only)
Search your title
If you’re not sure how to do this just ASK the library staff. No doubt they will be happy to show off their digital literary skills (secret exhibitionists! )
Not only can you search within an e-book for a topic, you can also search a collection of e-books. Collections subscribed to by RCSI include Access Medicine, ClinicalKey and AccessPhysiotherapy
Once you register with ClinicalKey you have licence to use the Multimedia content, you can export and copy slides, images, graphs and video to your projects. This will save you tons of time!
Clinical Summaries
UpToDate is a very popular site. Many hospital doctors use this for updated reviews on healthcare and it would be very useful for medical students in their clinical years and thereafter. It’s really useful for anyone working in the clinical areas. It’s a really cool way of keeping up to date or just for reminding yourself of a particular topic or condition from any mobile device. And of course there’s an App for that! (This is an RCSI subscription). DynaMed is also another really useful site, you can search medical and drug topics.
Institutional Repositories
Institutional Repositories are a great resource for free fulltext and open access articles, research papers, posters and more, which are produced by staff, students and researchers at a particular institution. Search RCSI's institutional repository e-publications@RCSI.
RIAN, the Irish word for 'path' is a combined search engine for 16 Irish research producing institutions including universities, government agencies and including the RCSI. You can see a full list of the institutions whose research is searchable via RIAN here and search the resource here.
OpenDOAR is another excellent resource for institutional repositories. It maintains a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories which can save a huge amount of time as you search for credible and verified research materials. You can see their listings of institutional repositories here and search across all of them here.
Good Old Google - Tip!
You can search individual repositories or simply google the title of your document/article and with any luck you may come across the full text free of charge. Just make sure that when you search to use www.google.com as www.google.ie may not find documents outside of the .ie domain.
C.Doherty
