Department of Medicine

Keeping up

Features to look for

  • Content
    • Scope of domain
      • Broad: FirstWatch (sample email) covers all of health care
      • Medium: BMJUpdates (sample email) has numerous channels and also a quality filter
      • Narrow: MyNCBI & PubMed Informer (sample email) lets you set up a custom alert on very specific topics
      • Very narrow: HighWire and Elsevier are major publishers of journals. Through them you can set up a custom alert based on any word in the full text of the article in the journals they cover. Good if you have a very narrow clinical or research focus.
    • Delay between article publication and coverage.
  • Convenience
    • Media (print, email, Internet, audio)
    • Searchable online archive
    • CME
    • Online storage of favorites (this is not as important if you have another way to store articles online such as Connotea or RefWorks.

Journal web sites

(all have free email table of contents that can be accessed at home with the UTHSCSA Proxy Me bookmarklet)

Journal Aggregators - 'Synoptic journals'

Aggregators
 
Publisher Scope Delay CME* Comments
ACP Journal Club American College of Physicians Internal Medicine 6 or more months   Overlap with Evidence-Based Medicine
BMJ Updates BMJ Publishing Group Primary Care 1-2 months  

• Free
• Abstracts only without commentaries
• Can select many topics for your alerts
• Can save articles online
• Feeds into Evidence Based Medicine??

Evidence Based Medicine BMJ Publishing Group Primary Care 6 or more months    
FirstWatch Massachusetts Medical Society Primary Care 1-3 days   • Free
InfoPoems InfoPoems Inc Primary Care 2-3 months    
Journal Watch Massachusetts Medical Society General and selected subspecialties 2-4 weeks Yes Multiple subscpecialty editions
 
         
New York Times? New York Times example None   Do this by setting up an alert to be emailed when articles contain the full name of a journal you are interested in, for example "New England Journal of Medicine", "Journal of the American Medical Association" , etc.
*Note that you can also pay to recieve CME credit if you use a personal subscription to UpToDate.

SDIs (Selective Dissemination of Information)

Note: SDIs usually provide citations only without commentaries