UNB Nursing LiBlog

The Library has recently acquired the online "backfiles", or older issues, of 17 Nursing and Health Professions journals published by Elsevier. This gives access to all the content back to volume 1 issue 1. Among the journals are Nursing Outlook, Women's Health Issues, and Complementary Therapies in Medicine. More information, with links to "landmark articles", is available at http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/content/journals/backfiles/collections/nursing_health/. If you are on campus, you will be able to connect directly to the journal content from this page, but if you are off campus, you will need to connect to the journals through the library website.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 11:36 AM | Permalink

UNB now has access to the complete Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Nursing & Health Professions Premier Collection of electronic journals. Some of these titles were previously available through the Ebsco and ProQuest journal packages, but the publisher now distributes them only through Journals@Ovid. The 58 titles in the list include important journals such as Advances in Nursing Science, Family and Community Health, Holistic Nursing Practice, Nursing, and the Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing. For a complete list of the titles, and information about the collection, see http://www.ovid.com/site/catalog/Group/2238.jsp?top=2&mid=3&bottom=7&subsection=12.

Access to these titles is through the e-Journals list at the UNB Libraries website. A nice bonus to having these journals from Ovid is their integration with CINAHL and Medline. If your CINAHL or Medline search result list includes articles from any of the Ovid Journals to which we have access (about 70 titles, including this new collection) a link to Ovid Full Text at the right-hand side of the screen will take you directly to the article. In that case, it's not necessary to click the LinkSource button to "Check for fulltext".

Posted by Frances Giberson at 11:05 AM | Permalink

With conference season, and Nursing Research Day, coming up soon, an interesting article has appeared in the current issue of Nurse Education in Practice:
Coad, J., & Devitt, P. (2006). Research dissemination: The art of writing an abstract for conferences. Nurse Education in Practice, 6(2), 112-116.

The abstract follows:

This article aims to assist readers with developing an abstract for a conference in order to have a paper accepted for presentation at a conference, whether it is in poster or an oral format. This is important as the authors argue that use of conferences as a method of disseminating research findings and good practice is expanding each year. Drawing on author experiences, both as members of scientific review panels and as submitters of abstracts, the article includes a practical review about the meaning of an abstract, how to get started and then breaks down in clear sections what reviewers look for in a good abstract. There are also some key points on the actual process of review, which are helpful in understanding of what happens to an abstract following submission.

This journal is available through the UNB Libraries e-Journal list.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 4:10 PM | Permalink

Several new collections of Sage journals are now available electronically through the UNB Libraries e-Journals listing. The names of the collections are:
Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Management & Organization Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Materials Science: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Political Science: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Psychology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Sociology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Urban Studies & Planning: A SAGE Full-Text Collection

These complement the Nursing & Health Sciences, Criminology, and Education collections to which we already had access. The Psychology and Sociology collections both contain several journals that will be of interest to researchers in Nursing. To see the title lists, go to the UNB Libraries e-Journals search page at http://www.lib.unb.ca/eresources/e-Journals.php and choose the collection name from the "Browse e-Journal Collections" box.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 9:20 AM | Permalink

UNB Libraries has added a new database called Scopus, which you can use to find articles in peer reviewed scientific, medical and technical journals. There is some coverage in the social sciences also. Scopus is quite easy to use, and you may find it a useful supplement to specialized databases such as CINAHL, PSYCInfo, Medline etc.,
particularly if you are looking for information on a topic that crosses disciplinary lines. As in our other databases, the LinkSource link resolver has been enabled, so you should be able to link directly to articles in e-journals to which UNB subscribes. To use Scopus, go to the UNB Libraries website at http://www.lib.unb.ca and choose Scopus from the Indexes and Abstracts list under the e-Resources dropdown menu at the top of the page.

When searching Scopus, you should keep in mind that it has certain limitations:
• Unlike CINAHL and most of our other specialized databases, coverage only goes back to the mid-90s.
• Scopus does not claim to cover any field of study in a comprehensive way. It is essentially a way of getting access to information about articles published in a number of large electronic journal collections.
• Scopus does not use any standardized search terms. Therefore you must use keyword searching, and try to think of all the possible synonyms to the terms you are searching. For example, if you were looking for articles about Pet Therapy and you entered “pet therapy” in the search box you would retrieve 84 items. A search using the synonym “animal assisted therapy” yields 85. Combining the two terms using “or” retrieves a total of 162 items, which indicates that most writers use one term or the other but not both. In CINAHL, on the other hand, either term entered into the search box would automatically map to the preferred term Pet Therapy, and you could retrieve all the references on that subject with one search.

A valuable additional component of Scopus is Scirus, an award-winning Web search engine that provides a single point of access to the scientific Web -- over 160 million pages and documents from websites relevant to research and education, including university sites, author homepages, digital libraries and archives, institutional repositories, preprint servers, and patents.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 10:13 AM | Permalink

The 206 journals in PubMed Central are now accessible through UNB Libraries. PubMed Central (PMC) is the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archives of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Participating journals, including such important titles as BMJ (British Medical Journal), CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) and Medical History, make some or all of their content available on the PubMed Central website. The amount of a journal's content that is available immediately varies, however. Some journals, such as BMJ, make all research articles available immediately, but do not provide access to other types of articles until one year after their publication. Others, such as Nutrition Journal, have an "open access" publishing model and all of their content is published free online.

Some of these current journals were already available at UNB from other sources, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of PubMed is its archival project. PubMed is digitizing the back issues of many journals and making them available free online. For example, Medical History is available electronically from 1957 to the present, while CMAJ's issues from 1914 to 1940 have been digitized so far. For more information about PubMed Central, go to http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/intro.html. To explore the list of PubMed Central journals, go to the UNB Libraries website at http://www.lib.unb.ca, choose e-Journals from the e-Resources menu, and pick PubMed Central from the "Browse e-Journal Collections" box.

Posted by Frances Giberson at 8:00 PM | Permalink