IndexCat, a new resource from the National Library of Medicine, continues a trend of converting old print resources to electronic format. This is good news for medical historians, those verifying citations and those wanting to be thorough in investigating the literature. In this latest effort, the National Library of Medicine has converted the print Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office to an online database called IndexCat.
The Index-Catalogue was published in five different series from 1880-1961. Following the expansion of U.S. Army medical services during the Civil War, the Surgeon-General amassed the largest medical library in the world. The first series captured the publications contained in the collection, ranging back to the 15th century. Subsequent series captured new publications and other materials that had come to light since the previous edition. Unlike OLDMEDLINE which (like MEDLINE) indexes only journal articles, IndexCat indexes books, dissertations, newspaper articles, obituaries, letters and portraits.
Searching IndexCat
As with MEDLINE, the subject headings assigned to indexed items changed with the different series and must be searched accordingly. In a future project, NLM will map the Index-Catalogue headings to MeSH.
Searchable fields include author, title, subject heading, journal title, item type and keyword anywhere which searches all of the other fields. The default search will look for any of the terms you enter (OR); so use quotation marks to search for a phrase. To find variations in words, use a question mark as the truncation symbol. For example, to find works published in the 16th century use Date Search : 15?. Note that results will display a maximum number of 1000 results for each collection.
You may also browse by choosing the folder icon next to the series checkbox.
Other Retroconversion Projects
The conversion trend was marked by last year's NLM roll-out of OLDMEDLINE, adding the ability to search journal citations from 1953 to 1965. While MEDLINE has provided citations from 1966 to the present for a long time, it now includes a few older citations as well.
Publishers are digitizing print issues of journals published before electronic journals became common around 1993. Backfiles of Cell Press titles were recently added to JEFFLINE's electronic journal collection.
Other JEFFLINE resources may help researchers explore publications before 1966.
- Comparison of early citations in JEFFLINE databases:
|
Database
|
Dates covered
|
Number of pre-1966 citations
|
Number of pre-1920 citations
|
|
IndexCat
|
1892-1961
|
3.7 million
|
3.7 million
|
|---|
|
Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials
|
1898-present
|
4243
|
5
|
|
MEDLINE
|
1966-present [officially; some older citations are included]
|
109297
|
6
|
|
OldMEDLINE
|
1951-1965
|
1704727
|
0
|
|
PsycINFO
|
1872-present
|
306931
|
24000
|
|
PubMed
|
1951-present
|
1813846
|
6
|
|
SportDiscus
|
1830-present
|
17442
|
2361
|
- JEFFLINE Journals with retrospective conversion to pre-electronic era
|
Bulletin of the Medical Library Association
|
1911-
|
|
Cell
|
1974-
|
|
Environmental Health Perspectives
|
1972-
|
|
Health affairs
|
1981-
|
|
Journal of biological chemistry (JBC)
|
1980-
|
|
Journal of lipid research
|
1959-
|
|
Journal of neuroscience
|
1981-
|
|
Morbidity and mortality weekly report (MMWR) -
|
1982-
|
|
National Center for Health Statistics publications
|
1960s-
|
|
Neuron
|
1988-
|
|
World Health Organization publications
|
1920s-
|
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