The Medical Library is pleased to offer the following list of publishing resources to Mercer School of Medicine faculty, staff and students. For further assistance, contact the Medical Library at 301-4056 or ask at the Circulation Desk. Please note that access to some resources is limited to comply with licensing requirements; see Access notes below for details.
Instructions for Authors - Biomedical Publications
The Mulford Library at Medical College of Ohio provides a list of links to instructions for authors for more than 3,500 publications in the health and life sciences. All links are to the publishers and organizations with editorial responsibilities for the titles. The database can be browsed or searched.
ACCESS: No restrictions
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals
Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (also known as Vancouver style) from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. These manuscript guidelines were first developed by a group of medical journal editors in 1978. They have been revised frequently and are currently followed by more than 500 biomedical journals, which include many of the requirements in their instructions to authors. Points include:
- Issues to consider before submitting a manuscript
- Requirements for submission
- Citation formats for references
- Tables, illustrations, legends, abbreviations
- Sending the manuscript to the journal
ACCESS: No restrictions
Citing Medicine - 2nd Edition, 2007
The National Library of Medicine's style guide for authors, editors, and publishers. This online edition is free and allows you to search the complete text of the book. Citing Medicine provides guidance for citing 26 types of published and unpublished material, ranging from print books and journal articles to blogs and wikis. Authors will find this a great resource for producing reference lists as they prepare articles and books for publication. Editors and librarians now have easy access to authoritative citation information, and publishers may discover useful guidelines to incorporate into their instructions for authors.
ACCESS: No restrictions
Vancouver Style Guide - also known as National Library of Medicine (NLM) Style
This reference style is the one approved by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Many biomedical journals require using this format, although some have their own variations. Check specific instructions for authors for the journal to which you're submitting.
ACCESS: No restrictions
American Psychological Association (APA) Formatting and Style Guide
APA Style is most often used for social sciences research. This style guide is from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University and is based on the 5th edition of the APA Manual.
ACCESS: No restrictions
APA Electronic References Guide
The APA has its own guide for using electronic references.
ACCESS: No restrictions
ISI Web of Knowledge
Includes Web of Science, Current Contents Connect, and ISI HighlyCited.com.
Web of Knowledge provides high-quality content and the tools to access, analyze, and manage research information in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Use Web of Science to perform cited reference searches, to find where an article or author has been cited; find articles that an article has cited; and identify more recent articles on the same topic. Access to Current Contents Connect allows you to browse a journal's table of contents for current and past issues; search the databases for published works by topic, author, address, journal, and more; and use the alerting option to have weekly updated results automatically e-mailed to you. You also have the capability of cross searching both of these databases. ISI HighlyCited.com gives you author biographies and bibliographies.
ACCESS: MUSM faculty, staff and students only. Not available off campus.
Selecting Keywords for Your Articles
This resources from the National Library of Medicine offers suggestions for authors of journal articles who are interested in selecting MeSH descriptors (terms) as key words for their articles.
ACCESS: No restrictions
Public Access Policy for NIH-Funded Articles
The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central.
ACCESS: No restrictions
RefWorks
Using RefWorks, researchers can: create personal reference databases by importing references from online databases or entering data; use these references in writing their papers; and automatically format the paper and the bibliography. As a web-based product, RefWorks is available to users across various platforms including Windows, Mac, Unix, etc. For training on how to use the system, contact the Medical Library.
ACCESS: MUSM faculty, staff and students only; requires account setup
Open Access Resources BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.
ACCESS: All research articles available with no access restrictions
Public Library of Science
"The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource ... To realize this potential, a new business model for scientific publishing is required that treats the costs of publication as the final integral step of the funding of a research project. To demonstrate that this publishing model will be successful for the publication of the very best research, PLoS will publish its own journals. PLoS Biology launched its first issue on October 13, 2003, in print and online." [from the PLoS Web site]. PLoS Medicine began publishing in October, 2004.
ACCESS: No restrictions
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's permanent digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Access to PMC is free and unrestricted. There are currently approximately 150 titles maintained with more being added.
ACCESS: No restrictions
Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) directs readers to free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages. There are now over 1,000 journals in the database. The service is sponsored by Lund University Libraries in Sweden.
ACCESS: No restrictions
