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Veterinary literature search on-line

There are several ways to search the Internet for veterinary references on a particular subject. Don't expect to find very many full length text papers available on-line, but the abstracts to most published papers relating to equine medicine and surgery are available. Using the traditional search engines such as Yahoo and Excite is not very helpful for finding scientific papers.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the best source; and it is free. Anyone can conduct a search (at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ PubMed/). NLM's search service accesses nine million citations in MEDLINE and Pre-MEDLINE (with links to participating on-line journals), and other related databases. PubMed offers excellent on-line help for searching by topic, phrase, author, journal, or Boolean opera- tors. A search can be limited to a specific date range. Search results can be displayed in several ways. To select a display format, click on the Display pull-down menu and then click Display. The display formats are: Abstract report (default), Citation report, and MEDLINE report. The latter is used to download records into bibliographic management software programs.

Citations in PubMed have a See Related Articles link that will retrieve a pre-calculate set of articles that closely relate to the selected article. PubMed compares words from the title, abstract, and MeSH terms using a powerful word-weighted algorithm. Citations are displayed in rank order from most to least relevant and the linked-from citation is displayed first.

I f you want the full text of a paper, you can sometimes obtain it from the journal publisher's web site, but usually a subscription fee is necessary. Copies of single papers can be ordered from Loansome Doc. The Order button on the Document Summary Page allows you to order documents from the PubMed page through Loansome Doc. Prior to using this program, you must establish an agreement with a Loansome Doc participating library. Local fees may apply. You can register directly from the PubMed homepage.

Internet Grateful Med (IGM) is another NLM search engine (found at http://igm.nlm.nih.gov). This search engine is free and accesses additional web sites, such as HealthSTAR, AIDSDRUGS, AIDSTRIALS, DIRLINE, HISTLINE, HSRPROJ, OLDMEDLINE, and SDILINE.

The ISI/NOAH World Veterinary Index accesses 85 veterinary journals, currently with over 70,000 abstracts and bibliographic references. This index, however, is quite expensive. Available only through AVMA, a NOAH subscription is $120/year and $150 for an ISI annual subscription. The search is done on NOAH where abstracts are obtained. The full text articles are obtained through the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). There is an additional charge for each document delivery. The AVMA is considering providing NOAH free to its members. NOAH sign-up forms can be downloaded from avma.org.

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