College Library: A support for retirement

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 56, No. 9, November 2014, Page 449 College Library
By: Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS

Retirement from professional life is a growing phenomenon as the baby boomer bulge comes face to face with advancing age. In this issue of the BCMJ, Dr Bob Vroom also addresses the topic in his editorial “Retiring gracefully” on page 426. Retirement for physicians means changes on many levels; however, access to the College Library can remain unchanged.

For $100 per year, retired physicians can continue with the same level of library service and access to the resources they came to expect during clinical practice. For instance, retired College registrants who subscribe to library services may receive an unlimited number of expert literature searches, request books and copies of articles, be informed of new clinical advances through the Cites & Bytes newsletter (www.cpsbc.ca/library/cites-bytes), and explore electronic resources (online articles, e-books, and point-of-care tools) through the College website (www.cpsbc.ca/library).

With retirement may come an interest in digging deeper into the literature than a busy practice afforded, and the Finding Medical Evidence workshop (ubccpd.ca/course-group/fme) presented by College librarians in association with UBC CPD will help to improve efficiency and effectiveness with literature searches. 

Physicians looking to begin scaling back their practice may be interested in articles about retirement itself. A simple approach would be to search through the PubMed link on the College Library’s website to maximize access to full-text articles (www.cpsbc.ca/library/search-materials/databases). PubMed is very accommodating to natural language searching, so try “retirement and physicians,” for example. Articles such as the following will be quickly found: “Personal finances for the physician: A primer on maintaining and protecting your earnings” (J Orthop Trauma 2014;28(7S):S50-58), “We need to get another life after retirement” (BMJ 2013;347:f7173), and “Prolonging a sustainable working life among older rural GPs: Solutions from the horse’s mouth” (Rural Remote Health 2013;13:2369).

Best of all, when retired, you’ll have time to find articles and read them too.
—Karen MacDonell
Director, Library Services

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This article is the opinion of the Library of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS. College Library: A support for retirement. BCMJ, Vol. 56, No. 9, November, 2014, Page(s) 449 - 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."
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For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

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