New tutorials, queries, and discovery guides now available
NLM’s NCBI Bookshelf provides free access to more than 13,000 peer-reviewed books and documents in life science and health care using over a dozen formats including monographs, reviews, reference works, government publications, standards and guidelines, technical reports, and textbooks. In acknowledgement of Open Access Week, we are excited to introduce new learning tools to better access and discover subject- and format-based collections within Bookshelf.
Bookshelf strives to advance open and equitable science and scholarship. To achieve this goal, Bookshelf collaborates with over 150 content providers, more than half of which are nontraditional publishers like government agencies and non-governmental organizations, to make their content publicly accessible. This diverse body of content is organized into user-relevant subcollections, such as “health disparities,” to better facilitate access and discovery. Over half of this content is also available for programmatic reuse through Bookshelf’s Open Access Subset.
What’s new?
Discovery Guides – step-by-step guides on how to explore three of Bookshelf’s most used content collections:
- Toxicology literature – over 500 reports, reviews, and reference resources from NIH, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and others.
- Open access online textbooks and reference works – over 250 textbooks and 300 reference works.
- Clinical practice guidelines and systematic reviews – nearly 6,000 of them from NIH, the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the National Institute for Health and Care Research in the UK, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and others.
Video Tutorials – short videos using different use cases to demonstrate easy ways to search and navigate Bookshelf.
Subject Queries – queries on a variety of subject areas ranging from “addiction medicine” to “veterinary medicine” structured to increase the relevancy of search results.
Format Queries – preformatted queries that you can implement to find publications in Bookshelf in a variety of formats, including catalogs, databases, government publications, technical reports, textbooks, and more.
To further aid discovery of textbooks and other freely available education resources, we added an “All Textbooks” link under the “Related Items on Bookshelf” section on the website that provides you direct access to Bookshelf’s full collection of textbooks.
About 75% of the clinical guidelines and systematic reviews in the Bookshelf collection are also available for mining and reuse through Bookshelf’s FTP service. To facilitate programmatic access of these nearly 4,500 documents from WHO and other agencies like AHRQ, Bookshelf provides a machine-readable, structured Excel spreadsheet that is updated monthly.
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Questions?
If you have questions or would like to provide feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected].