Learning at your convenience

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 52, No. 1, January February 2010, Page 18 College Library
By: Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS Robert Melrose Judy Neill

Access to clinical information is often best used when the physician is at the point of care. But what about the kind of learning that requires quiet contemplation? 

Continuing medical education at the point of convenience, when the learner has the time to focus and concentrate, is clearly ideal. This can be achieved by listening to audio files on portable CD or MP3 players, or even on smartphones. 

Audio-Digest Foundation, an affiliate of the California Medical Association, has been offering recordings of lectures of CME meetings from across the USA for more than 50 years. The lectures cover a wide range of specialties including anesthesiology, emergency medicine, family practice, gastroenterology, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, otolaryngology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. 

The College Library subscribes to these lectures in CD format and makes them available for loan. Furthermore, since 2006, the files have been available in MP3 format. Through the Library’s account at Audio-Digest, College members may download hundreds of files and listen to them on their computers or mobile devices for free. Instructions for access are on the library’s web site at the Audiovisual & PDA page, www.cpsbc.ca/library/pda-video-audio. 

A limited number of these files have been made publically available by Audio-Digest on the iTunes web site, but access using the College’s web site offers a much larger selection by virtue of the Library’s subscription.
—Karen MacDonell
—Robert Melrose
—Judy Neill
College Librarians

Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS, Robert Melrose, Judy Neill. Learning at your convenience. BCMJ, Vol. 52, No. 1, January, February, 2010, Page(s) 18 - 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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