I read an interesting little article today in The Chronicle of Higher Education, PubMed Now Indexes Videos of Experiments and Protocols in Life Sciences. The Journal of Visualized Experiments is now indexed in PubMed.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal dedicated to the publication of biological research in a video format. JoVE states, "Visualization greatly facilitates the understanding and efficient reproduction of both basic and complex experimental techniques, thereby addressing two of the biggest challenges faced by today’s life science research community: i) low transparency and poor reproducibility of biological experiments and ii) time and labor-intensive nature of learning new experimental techniques." Recently JoVE an agreement with various science publishing companies such as Current Protocols for joint protocol publication. This video on the "Preparation and Fractionation of Xenopus Laevis Egg Extracts" was jointly published by JoVE and Current Protocols.

According to JoVE's official blog it is "first video-journal to be accepted in PubMed." Well that is probably because JoVE is a unique journal. I don't see that many peer reviewed protocol video journals out there. Don't get me wrong, it is good that they are indexed in PubMed and that helps speak to their content and their credibility, but it their videos aren't the only ones to be indexed in PubMed. There are now quite a few videos from index journals that show up in PubMed. For example you can find the citation to the video "Placement of a Femoral Venous Catheter" by Janet Y. Tsui in the New England Journal of Medicine. The indexing of the videos shows NLMs commitment to medical information beyond the printed word.

Labels: Medline Database, PubMed, Technology