What your colleagues are reading

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 59, No. 8, October 2017, Page 399 College Library
By: Niki Baumann

How do you quickly sort through the copious medical literature to find a few articles that will really impact your decisions? One way is to see what your colleagues thought was worth reading.

This Changed My Practice
On this award-winning blog, BC doctors can share insights and learn from each other. The concise format is perfect for the busy clinician, and references have links to full text where available. (You may have to log in through the College Library or UBC Library.) Both the College of Family Physicians of Canada and Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada provide CME credits for reading blog entries. Select your specialty on the right-hand side, or just scroll through the blog to see what’s new. http://thischangedmypractice.com

McMaster’s EvidenceAlerts
Staff at McMaster University review over 120 clinical journals and evaluate the articles for quality. The selected articles are then rated by at least three physicians, and only those of greatest relevance and newsworthiness are included in the e‑mail alerts. This service is free but requires you to create an account where you can indicate your specialties of interest and select how often you would like to receive alerts. https://plus.mcmaster.ca/evidencealerts

Read by QxMD
This app highlights new articles in topics or journals that you follow. When creating a Read account, you select a specialty (under Account Details in the app, My Profile on the web). By default, your account is set to receive the week’s most read or most popular articles in your selected specialty. To create an account, go to www.cpsbc.ca/library/search-materials/databases. 
—Niki Baumann
Librarian

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This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

Niki Baumann. What your colleagues are reading. BCMJ, Vol. 59, No. 8, October, 2017, Page(s) 399 - College Library.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

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