Guide to publications
Interpreting citations
On various pages on our website, you will notice references and citations to third-party articles and papers. These will be presented in the following format:
Schulz-Key, Steffen, Jan-Olof Carlsson, and Sven Crafoord. "Longterm follow-up of pars plana vitrectomy for vitreous floaters: complications, outcomes and patient satisfaction." Acta Ophthalmol. 89.2 (2011): 159-65.
This is translated as follows:
Main author, subsidiary author. "Article title." Publication name. Volume.Edition (Year): Pages.
In most cases, scientific papers referred to on our website will be held in our publications library where you can get more information about them and read an abstract.
How to find publications
Most of these articles are still under copyright law and owned by their publishing company and/or author and supplied to libraries with certain conditions. In all but a few cases, we are unable to post the full article on our site or to distribute it if we have a copy. If you would like to read the full text, you will need to get an individual copy.
Publisher arrangements and fees vary. Some journals require you to subscribe to them or pay-per-view, whereas others are "open-access" and free to all with certain conditions attached, such as only for non-commercial use. Free papers can be found through various directories and of course, lots of articles are also circulating illegally on the web. We will always attempt to identify a responsible source for articles we post and add a link to that.
If you are unable to find a free copy of the article online or to get it from the publisher's back-catalogue, then you can try library catalogues. There are a number of large academic and medical libraries and document repositories around the world which have agreements with the publishers to hold copies of journals and medical papers. Some of the best ones are listed below. In many cases, you need to be a registered professional and a member to have access to their full services, but as a member of the public you can still usually order copies, again with certain conditions of use.
The first thing to do is to try searching their online catalogue and ordering online. If you cannot find the paper, it is worth emailing them to ask if they have a copy that you can access. Most academic libraries allow the public to access their reading rooms in person or will post copies out for a small admin' fee.
Useful resources
Libaries
- British Library Direct
- British Library: Document Supply Centre
- British Medical Library, library of the British Medical Association.
- Pubmed - US government medical library.
- The Joint Library of the Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Largest specialist library in Europe.
- NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)
- Your own or local university library.
Online directories and services
- Google scholar, Google's article search engine
- BioInfoBank Library
- Biomed Central, Directory of free open-access journals
- Directory of open access journals
- Highwire Press, Directory of free articles
- Zetoc, British Library's Electronic Table of Contents
- ISI Web of Knowledge, Medical Library database
- Loansome Doc, Order publications from medical libraries (US)
- NCBI Bookshelf, Free
- OCLC FirstSearch, For Athens members
- Public Library of Science, Free
- PubMed Central, Free subset of PubMed
- UK PubMed Central
- RefDoc, French
- SciELO España, Spanish
- CrossRef, The official DOI link registration agency for scholarly and professional publications
- WorldCat, World's largest network of library content and services
