Learn how to find articles about a chemical or drug of interest. This 45-minute online clinic will cover how the NLM MeSH® vocabulary is used to describe substance concepts and how to search PubMed for relevant articles. The clinic is designed for librarians and other information specialists with little to moderate experience in searching for articles about chemicals or drugs in PubMed. Participants are expected to have a basic understanding of how to search PubMed.

Date: Thursday, August 23rd
Time: 2:00 - 2:45pm EDT
http://webmeeting.nih.gov/pmchems/ (password required)

The clinic will be limited to the first 150 registrants, so please register early.

On the week of the clinic, registrants will receive an e-mail message from “NIH Breeze Admin” with their unique password for access to the clinic.

This clinic will be recorded. You will be able to access the recording of the clinic from this page.

The clinic will be hosted using Adobe® Connect^TM. You may be prompted to download a plug-in at the site. Note that you will need speakers on your computer for the audio.

More information about substances in MeSH from The Basics of Medical Subject Headings

PubMed Central (PMC), NLM’s free digital archive of full-text journal articles, reached the one million-article mark the week of June 18. The millionth article reportedly came from the American Journal of Pathology. Now in its seventh year, PMC is enhanced each week with articles from over 350 important life sciences journals whose publishers have agreed to deposit current issues. All of the content submitted to PMC is converted to a normalized electronic format for long-term storage and display on the web.

Many of the participating publishers have also benefited from the PMC Back Issue Digitization Project, where NLM scans older issues from cover to cover, starting with volume 1, and creates PubMed citations for articles that are not in PubMed. Jointly sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, the NLM scanning project has collected and collated over 5 million pages of material. As of June 2007, these scanned articles accounted for 675,000 of the million articles in PMC.

Because of back issue digitization, several historically important works are now available in their entirety, including: Annals of Surgery from v.1, 1885; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. from v. 1, 1915; and all of the titles published by the American Society for Microbiology, including the Journal of Bacteriology, from v.1, 1916. This year, scanning was completed for the American Journal of Public Health v. 2 1912, and very soon BMJ will be available back to v. 1, 1857 along with all of the specialty journals published by the British Medical Association. Each of these titles continues to participate in PMC by submitting current content in full-text electronic form for every issue.

NLM is indebted to a wide range of publishers depositing electronically produced content to PMC and to a host of contributors to the back issue scanning project. Worldwide donations from libraries and associations of disposable back issues have assisted NLM with filling in journal volumes not supplied by publishers. While all donations are gratefully received, two institutions deserve special mention: the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and Brown University in Providence, RI.

The staff of NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information is responsible for the technical oversight of PMC and for the flow of current and scanned content, enabling PMC to grow exponentially each month. The staff of Library Operations manages contract activities, quality control and journal issue collection for the scanning project. To learn more about PubMed Central, or to browse its contents, go to: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov.