With so many new journal titles appearing each year, it is becoming more and more difficult to determine the quality and legitimacy of new scholarly publications. One often overlooked search tool that is useful for confirming whether – and to what extent – a journal is being indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed or both is: Journals in NCBI Databases. (NCBI stands for the National Center for Biotechnology Information.)

This resource can be accessed under “More Resources” from the PubMed homepage and is essentially a search of the (National Library of Medicine or NLM) NLM’s catalog limited to the subset of journals that are referenced in NCBI database records.

There are essentially three statuses that a journal can have in PubMed:

• Every article in the journal is indexed in the Medline database (ie. Index Medicus) and PubMed.  PubMed was created to be the free public search interface to the Medline database so all Medline records will appear in PubMed. Medline records are also leased by other commercial databases, for example EMBASE, Scopus, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Clinical Trials (CENTRAL), so being indexed in MEDLINE will give a journal article maximum visibility.
  Index medicus: v8n1, 2014-
  MEDLINE: v8n1, 2014-
  PubMed: v8n1, 2014-
  Currently indexed for MEDLINE. Continue reading →

Scopus, an Elsevier database that the MSK Library subscribes to, differs from PubMed in some significant ways. Here are the key differences to keep in mind when you are selecting the best tool to use for your next research project:

• Scopus includes Cited References, in fact they recently reached a project milestone of 5M cited references added. Cited references are essentially the references in an indexed article’s bibliography, which – if included in a database’s citations records, allow for searchers to see which other articles have cited a particular article since its publication. Note: PubMed records do not include cited references; however, PubMed has begun displaying links to cited references pulled from full-text articles included in PubMed Central (PMC).

• Scopus includes more than just articles, also indexing books, book chapters, and conference abstracts.

• Scopus includes journal titles that go beyond the strictly biomedical disciplines, including content from journal titles in the Health Sciences and Life Sciences, but also from the Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. Continue reading →

Altmetric, a system that tracks the attention that scholarly articles and datasets receive online by pulling in “posts” from social media, traditional media and online reference managers, has announced that they have expanded to also monitor the attention of ClinicalTrials.gov study records. As per the company’s November 12 press release: “Patients, researchers, healthcare professionals, regulators, and many others can now read the conversations and media coverage surrounding specific clinical trials, even before results have been published.”

As of the date of the press release, the Altmetric Bookmarklet was not yet appearing on the ClinicalTrials.gov pages, however, there are plans to have it added in the near future.

Feel free to contact the library with any questions about Altmetric or for information on any other scholarly literature quality metrics.