Three new initiatives involving bmj.com
BMJ 2002; 324 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.324.7337.559 (Published 09 March 2002) Cite this as: BMJ 2002;324:559
Taming the information beast
- Tony Delamothe, web editor bmj.com
The BMJ's website is participating in three new initiatives that should make visitors' lives easier and more interesting. What each initiative shares is an attempt to make large amounts of information more manageable.
By clicking and dragging on HighWire's Topic Map, topics can be exposed in more or less detail. In this example, clinical medicine has been “exploded” showing some of its subcategories. These subcategories can be further exploded by dragging them into the centre of the field. Double clicking on a topic provides a list of documents
HighWire Library of Science and Medicine
(http://highwire.stanford.edu/)
As well as hosting bmj.com, Stanford University's HighWire Press hosts the electronic versions of over 300 scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Science. The full text of nearly half the world's 200 most cited science journals are now available from HighWire.
Only a dozen of these journals share bmj.com's policy of offering free access from the moment of publication, but most open up their archives within a year of publication. This means that HighWire now offers free access to the full text of over 400 000 articles, making it the largest archive of free, life science articles in the world.
But more is not necessarily better if it increases the difficulty of finding what you want.
Responding to researchers' needs for easier navigation through the rapidly increasing body of online literature, HighWire and its participating publishers have cooperated on the creation of a single site. This will offer seamless, full text access to all HighWire journals as well as simultaneous, searchable access to PubMed's 11.8m articles. Searches can be limited to users' favourite journals, and the site makes clear when an article is free or accessible via a personal or institutional subscription.
While this could be described as just more of the same, albeit on a massive scale, the site has several powerful new search features. Subject based browsing allows researchers who are new to a field to locate relevant articles without needing to know the articles' authors or titles. And, most intriguingly, a graphical “TopicMap” provides a sense of context during navigation of a tree structured taxonomy (see figure).
Early in April, the new site will extend the Citetrack feature available on individual journal sites. From a single page users will be able to sign up to receive email alerts whenever new content is published in participating journals, or in the whole of Medline. Users can nominate which journals they're interested in, and specify the new content they want to be alerted to. This could include journals' tables of content (available now), articles on particular topics, articles by particular individuals, or subsequent references to articles of interest.
More new features will be added later this year, which will allow individuals to customise the site, according to their needs. Using online folders, they will be able to save and re-execute frequently used searches and list and organise articles of importance to them, allowing fast and simple access.
Integrated handheld and web based service
Doctors are nomadic, so information must be portable. Because it mostly isn't, nearly two thirds of the questions that arise in clinical settings remain unanswered. 1 2 An awareness of this problem underlies the collaboration between Unbound Medicine and the BMJ Publishing Group. Together we have launched an integrated handheld and web based service, offering users access to BMJ, Clinical Evidence, and the publishing group's specialist journals on their handheld devices.
This allows users to keep abreast of the latest medical literature and to access evidence based answers while on the move. Quick reference portions of Clinical Evidence and the latest tables of contents and abstracts from the BMJ and specialist journals are delivered to the user's handheld device. Users can request the full text of the content of interest and capture questions that might otherwise be forgotten.
On synchronisation, these requests are sent to each user's personal web page, from where users can link to the full text of the relevant article as well as perform sophisticated PubMed searches.
Our current six month trial is for Palm OS devices only, which account for two thirds of the users who expressed an interest in participating. (A pocket PC version will be released mid year for the remaining third.) In the trial's first few weeks more than 500 people successfully downloaded content, with 86% of them accessing the service at least weekly.
UK health news digest
As newspapers publish ever more health stories, doctors are increasingly likely to be consulted by patients wondering whether a particular new finding is relevant to them. Few doctors have the time to digest the health stories from just one daily newspaper before setting off to work; none has the time and resources to do that for the entire range of newspapers that their patients may have read.
When we asked general practitioners in the United Kingdom whether they would be interested in a free daily digest of healthcare articles their patients may have read, half of them said yes.
We have therefore begun posting summaries of medical articles appearing in the UK national press on our website by 8am each weekday morning. These summaries are linked back to the website of the newspaper in which they appeared, so that stories may be read in full (for as long as they remain accessible).
The summaries are archived, providing a resource for future researchers who want to see how a particular medical issue was handled by the lay press. The site also links to Hitting the Headlines, a service hosted by the National electronic Library for Health, which analyses the evidence behind selected health stories.