The IEEE Biomedical Engineering Library (BEL) provides full‐text access to biotechnology and biomedical papers published by IEEE and IEE in their journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. It includes more than 40,000 documents in all, including IEEE Standards. The documents are selected using relevant INSPEC1 classification codes and index terms, and are presented through an interface specifically designed for the biomedical community. Over 130 journals, 200 unique conferences and 25 relevant IEEE standards are included. Sample sources are: IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Magazine, and Electrical Insulation & Dielectric Phenomena, 2002 Annual Report.
The documents are in full‐text PDF, meaning Adobe Acrobat is required to view the papers. The abstracts are searchable, and live reference links are available. The interface is intuitive and user‐friendly, and I prefer it to the one used in IEEE Xplore (RR 2002/198). Users may search by index term, author, or affiliation. Sample index/topic terms include: bioelectricity, cellular biophysics, molecular biophysics, lasers and masers, microwave technology, and systems theory and cybernetics. The backfile goes extends to 1988.
One negative aspect is the “documents that cite this document” feature, a link for which is available at the bottom of each document record. In most cases, there will be nothing under this link because it refers only to those documents listed in BEL.
Possible customers of BEL include universities that focus on biomedical research and/or support a curriculum in the field. The content of BEL is a subset of the material contained in IEEE Xplore. Therefore, libraries that subscribe to IEEE Xplore already have access to the biomedical and biotechnology papers, conference proceedings, and standards provided here. The difference between the two, besides the interface, is that the selective nature of BEL guarantees that users’ queries will return information relevant to bioengineering. With contributions from a broad range of IEEE and IEE publications and IEEE standards, documents found here comprise the core collection of articles in the field, selected from IEEE’s complete holdings of nearly a million documents published since 1988.
Online help is available, as are technical support, free user training, and online training materials. I recommend this database. The content is very specific and relevant to the biomedical field.
