Health Libraries Review 

About: Health Libraries Review is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Health care & Information system. It has an ISSN identifier of 0265-6647. Over the lifetime, 371 publications have been published receiving 2245 citations.

What are the Read Codes

Abstract: The Read Codes were initially developed by a general practitioner, Dr James Read from Loughborough, in the early 1980s and rapidly gained acceptance by general practitioners as a popular and useful mechanism for storing structured information about patients in individual, patient-based records, which were beginning to become popular in a few general practices at the time. This short article aims to explain the past and future development of the coding system in the National Health Service as a whole.

Searching the right database. A comparison of four databases for psychiatry journals

Abstract: Journal coverage is one factor that affects the retrieval of relevant information from bibliographic databases. The aims of this study were to investigate the coverage of databases for psychiatry journals, and to assess the overlap between databases. Psychiatry journals were identified using Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory and then analysed to see which bibliographic databases indexed the most journals. A total of 213 abstracting and indexing services were listed as indexing at least one of the 977 psychiatry journals identified. The four most frequently cited databases (PsycLIT, EMBASE, BIOSIS and MEDLINE) indexed 506 (52%) of the psychiatry journals. Of these 506 journals, PsycLIT indexed 367 (73%), EMBASE 337 (67%), BIOSIS 243 (48%) and MEDLINE 236 (47%). Combining the databases with the highest yields (PsycLIT and EMBASE) increased the number of journals indexed to 461 (91%). The four databases combined accounted for 90% of all psychiatry journals found to be indexed by at least one abstracting and indexing service. More than 400 journals were not indexed at all. Variations in the overlap between PsycLIT, EMBASE, BIOSIS and MEDLINE, and the high proportion (35%) of journals indexed in only one of these four databases emphasize the importance of searching more than one or even two databases to ensure optimal coverage of the literature.

Efficient literature searching in diffuse topics: lessons from a systematic review of research on communicating risk to patients in primary care

Abstract: Using the example of communication about risk in a primary care setting, this paper puts forward a method of developing and evaluating a detailed search strategy for locating the literature for a systematic review of a ‘diffuse’ subject. The aim of this paper is to show how to develop a search strategy that maximizes both recall and precision while keeping search outputs manageable. Six different databases were used, namely Medline, Embase, PsychLIT, CancerLIT, Cinahl and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The searches were augmented by hand-searching, contacting authors, citation searching and reference lists from included papers. Other databases were searched but yielded no extra references for this subject matter. Of the 99 papers included, 80 were indexed on Medline. The Medline search strategy identified 54 of them and the remaining 26 were located on other databases. The 19 further unique references were found using the other databases and methods of retrieval. A combination of several databases must be used to maximize recall and to increase the precision of searches on individual databases, thus improving the overall efficiency of the search.

Mentoring in professional associations: continuing professional development for librarians

Abstract: This article argues for the inclusion of mentoring as a form of continuing professional development to be offered by professional associations to their members. It discusses the comparatively recent emergence of formal and facilitated mentoring programmes, which differ from the traditional model. These developments have increased its suitability to being offered as part of structured programmes of continuing professional development. The article also considers that mentoring within a profession has some advantages as a form of continuing professional development that make it particularly suited to meeting the needs of mentors, mentorees and the professional associations that sponsor mentoring programmes.