Being au courant

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 56, No. 5, June 2014, Page 223 College Library
By: Robert Melrose

Let the library keep you au courant of the latest issue of a journal and abreast of the latest medical developments in your specialty. Subscribe to the library’s current awareness services—table of contents or subject alerts.

The table of contents service provides e-mail notification when the latest issue of a requested medical journal is available. The service is available for any journal that provides an e-mail version of its table of contents. Inform the library of the journal titles for which you wish to receive notification and we will create an e-table of content alert. When a new issue is published, you will receive an e-mail from the library containing the issue’s table of contents. After viewing the table of contents, contact the library to provide you with—where available—the full-text article to read. 

The subject alerts service can either be administered by the library or you may create your own Medline subject alert in either the OVID or PubMed interface. A search profile on your topic of interest is created and run in the Medline database. When new Medline citations matching your search profile are retrieved, these results are e-mailed to you monthly. Contact a librarian for assistance in creating your search profile and administering the subject alert.

To subscribe to these current awareness services, e-mail the library at medlib@cpsbc.ca.
— Robert Melrose
College 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This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

Robert Melrose. Being au courant. BCMJ, Vol. 56, No. 5, June, 2014, Page(s) 223 - 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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