Library services for BC family physicians

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 67, No. 7, September 2025, Page 235 Letters
By: Murray Trusler, MD, MBA, FCFP, FRRMS,

I read with interest Dr Faye MacKay’s excellent letter to the editor in the May issue of the BCMJ [2025;67:127]. Dr MacKay was justifiably distressed over the abrupt closure of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC’s library service. I, too, was dismayed by the loss of this excellent service, which I used frequently over the years.

To compound the issue, the College of Family Physicians of Canada has subsequently also closed its excellent library service. Both library services were discontinued due to cost considerations.

BC family physicians are now left without a library research resource at a time when medicine is in the midst of rapidly accelerating clinical and technological advancements across all disciplines.

Doctors of BC and the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) have a collaborative relationship, particularly in advocating for physicians and the health care system in BC and Canada, respectively. They also work together on joint initiatives.

A few years ago, the CMA sold MD Financial Management to Scotiabank for $2.6 billion. Would it be too much to ask Doctors of BC to approach the CMA to fund a national library service for the benefit of all its members, as another good reason to belong to the CMA?
—Murray Trusler, MD, MBA, CCFP, FCFP
Peachland

This letter was submitted in response to “Re: Closure of the CPSBC Library.”

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Murray Trusler, MD, MBA, FCFP, FRRMS,. Library services for BC family physicians. BCMJ, Vol. 67, No. 7, September, 2025, Page(s) 235 - Letters.


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

Leave a Reply