Welcome New Med Students!

Welcome to the Library!

New E-Journals Page

The Loyola University Health Sciences Library has a new A to Z full-text title list generator. This list will help users navigate to full-text by searching by title or by browsing title by title alphabetically or by subject. This new E-Journals page allows us to provide you access to thousands of new journal titles. All of the full-text titles The Health Sciences Library currently subscribes to are listed as well as open access collections such as PubMed Central and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and full-text titles that are available via our membership in various library consortia are included.

We are aware that there are still some bugs in this new problem that we are working on. If you run into any difficulties or have any questions or comments about the new E-Journal pages, please contact Heather Cannon at x6-5302 or hcannon@lumc.edu

ScienceDirect Journals Outage

Some journals the library subscribes to on ScienceDirect are not allowing our users to access the most recent issues. We are working with ScienceDirect’s customer service and technical helpdesk to try to resolve this problem as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, if you need access to an article from a journal and aren’t able to retrieve it online, please fill out an InterLibrary Loan request and we will get the article to you as soon as possible.

Another notice will be posted on the Health Sciences Library blog when the problem has been resolved. Thank you for your patience.

Medline versus Google Scholar

Many of you have used Google Scholar to find journal articles. But is Google Scholar the way to go if you are looking for clinical information? Should you be using Medline instead? Here are a few things to think about when you need information on a clinical topic:

• Medline has 16 million citations from 5,000 journals. Google Scholar “harvests” information from other websites. The number of records and journals covered is unknown.
• The National Library of Medicine indexes and maintains these records with strict quality control methods. Google Scholar has no quality control methods. There is no standardized terms for searching concepts.
• The records in Medline are permanent. If you found an article last month, you will find it again this month. In Google Scholar, records can appear or disappear as publishers change their policies. You have no idea what you are missing.
• Medline is updated on a daily basis. Google Scholar is updated on a monthly basis.
• If you search Medline through the Health Sciences Library (OVID, PubMed), you will be able to identify and/or link to all the full-text journals the Library subscribes to (approximated 1,400 titles). With Google scholar, you only get the full text if it is free on the Web.

Searching Google Scholar is fine for quick and dirty searches but results can be inconsistent and you might miss important papers. Next time you are looking for clinical information, try Medline instead of Google Scholar.

Check out a recent article about this issue:

Falagas, M. Comparison of Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: Strengths and Weaknesses. FASEB Journal. 2008 Feb;22(2):338-42.

If you need help searching Medline, contact a reference librarian at 6-9192 or e-mail us at researchservices@lumc.edu