Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Free Medical Journals and Free Books 4 Doctors!

In the summer, I saw a note about Free Medical Journals. This website provides readers access to the text of articles in 1392 medical journals (as of October 28, 2009). In many cases, the latest issues are not free. Both JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine offer their articles after six months, while BMJ (British Medical Journal) holds the texts for three years. The Canadian Medical Association Journal is free immediately. Readers may be somewhat frustrated by not being to get many of the articles as they are reported in the news, but at least, libraries who have had to drop medical periodicals for balancing budgets do have some recourse if fulltext is not in their subscription databases.

Organization and searching seems to be just by topic of journal as a whole. Users need to know medical terms to get good results, though searching "blood" does get "hematology."

What I did not know before is that there is also Free Books 4 Doctors! Despite the page title, it appears that anyone (not just doctors) can read from 365 medical texts. 38 of the titles are in Spanish. Other languages are also included, even Mongolian. Strangely, one of the books is a novel, Murder in Casteddu by Mary Miller.

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