WebMedLit is a web site designed to give convenient, current‐awareness style access to 18 core medical journals including: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Archives of Dermatology, Archives of Family Medicine, Archives of Neurology, Archives of Ophthalmology, Archives of Otolaryngology, Archives of Pediatrics, Archives of General Psychiatry, Archives of Surgery, Archives of Internal Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Archives of Women’s Health, Nature Medicine, Diabetes Care, JNCI, and the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Easy to navigate using graphical web software (it was reviewed using Netscape 3.0), WebMedLit is gentle on the eyes ‐ yet not boring ‐ and well organized. With few graphics to load, the site comes up quickly, which is a blessing to visitors with slow modems and connections. The initial page contains subject categories and a list of journals in reverse chronological order, with visible publication dates. All links proved good although the What’s New section needs to be updated.
There are other locations available on the web, such as the WWW Virtual Library, where one can find the journals listed in WebMedLit in addition to many other medical publications. However, WebMedLit concentrates on titles focusing on clinical medicine or human epidemiology that provide web users free access to either full‐text or detailed abstracts of articles. Journals that only provide table‐of‐contents are not included. In addition, WebMedLit is updated whenever a new issue of a journal comes out, which is not typical of other sites.
Listing the journals in reverse chronological order, with links providing access to the journals’ sites, is useful to individuals who keep up‐to‐date with the medical literature. It would also be helpful to have an alphabetical listing for quick access. Without this, it is necessary to scan the entire list to find a specific journal. In addition, some visitors may find it convenient to know from the first page if registration with the journal is necessary before journal contents are displayed.
For subject access to articles, WebMedLit has provided ten subject categories: AIDS/virology, cancer/oncology, diabetes/endocrinology, immunology, neurology, cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, medical economics, and women’s health. After selecting a category, specific article titles from the 18 journals appear in reverse chronological order. These are linked to the journals’ web sites, labeled with descriptive keywords and journal names, and indicate whether registration with the journal is necessary. The Excite search engine is used to index WebMedLit and six weeks worth of each journal is maintained on WebMedLit. After that time, WebMedLit suggests users search MEDLINE for journal citations.
Relevant news stories via PR newswire news are also available through the subject categories. The keywords describing articles in each category serve as search terms with the Excite search engine to produce relevancy‐ranked lists of titles.
WebMedLit does not replace current awareness products such as Current Contents or Reference Update which index many journals. Nor does it provide a lengthy list of all medical journals found on the Internet. However, I recommend WebMedLit to medical professionals or lay people who are interested in accessing or keeping up‐to‐date with a few key medical journals. In addition, public and academic library patrons who utilize medical resources on the web may find it useful to have access to this site through their libraries’ web pages. WebMedLit is organized, fast, clear, easy to use with familiar web browsers, kept up‐to‐date, and provides access to the core clinical medicine or human epidemiology journals on the web.
