E-vailability of e-books

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 52, No. 7, September 2010, Page 368 College Library

The common fallacy that everything is available on the Internet is actually true for 80 current medical textbooks available in electronic format through the library page of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC web site.

The common fallacy that “everything is available on the Internet” is actually true for 80 current medical textbooks available in electronic format through the library page of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC web site. 

The College Library has licensed e-books with two different providers, NetLibrary and Stat!Ref, and all members can access these books in full text, remotely from any computer. 

E-books are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on a wide range of subjects, including anesthesia, cardiology, emer­gency medicine, geriatrics, orthopae­dics, psychiatry, and surgery. 

Some of the titles available include Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Evidence-Based Emergency Medicine, Adams and Victor’s Principles of Neurology, DSM-IV-TR, and ACS Sur­gery: Principles & Practice. The complete list can be found under the Books link on the library main page. 

NetLibrary and Stat!Ref have federated search engines that search their e-books. To perform a thorough e-book search you must do one search in NetLibrary and a second in Stat!Ref. 

All e-books can be viewed online, but NetLibrary provides book “loans”: users can download books to their computer desktop for a 2-week loan period. NetLibrary is, for the College Library, a new provider of e-books, and the format for their titles is a PDF of the print copy. 

The content in NetLibrary is text-word searchable, but the look is more traditional. College Library users may already be familiar with the Stat!Ref interface through the point-of-care tool ACP PIER, which we have licensed for several years.  

For further information about these expanded resources, please contact us either by e-mail (medlib@mls.cpsbc.ca) or phone (604 733-6671).
—Karen MacDonell
—Robert Melrose
—Judy Neill
College Librarians

. E-vailability of e-books. BCMJ, Vol. 52, No. 7, September, 2010, Page(s) 368 - 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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