ticTocs Journal Table of Contents Service
Finding a table of contents alert service as been a small ongoing personal project of mine. I still have yet to find a product on the market that does a good job. The most recent to hit the Internet is ticTocs. ticTocs is a free, easy to use site that researchers can use to keep up to date with their favorite journals' table of contents. There are 12,272 TOCs from 436 publishers linking to 333,977 articles. The TOC feeds can be read in your favorite feed reader.
Sounds great right? I decided to give it a try. ticTocs mentions that in order to get the full text of an article users must either have a personal or institutional subscription. I wanted to see how it handled accessing the full text of an article using an institutional subscription. Why did I do this? Most researchers subscribe to a few core journals, but they want the table of contents to more than just those few that they personally subscribe to. They want the table of contents and the full text to those articles. So any table of contents program really needs to figure out how to address people accessing the full text through an institutional subscription. ticTocs does not do this. They just link to the publishers' site. This works well for some journals, but for journals that have publishers like Lippincott Williams and Wilkins this is a problem. LWW titles are only available to institutions through Ovid, not through the the Lippincott site. Linking only to the publisher's site also does not address the myriad other ways institutions access full text articles, such as institutionally subscribed databases.
If a majority of a user's institutional online journal subscriptions come directly from the publishers' sites then they will be pleased with ticTocs. (Unless they are trying to access Lippincott titles. Come on Lippincott get with the program. Forcing institutions to access the full text through Ovid is inefficient and reflects poorly on your product.) However, if a user wants the TOC to one of the many other medical journals that are available through the institutions full text databases, then they are going to be dissatisfied.
I keep telling people that this is an area for some database company like EBSCO or Ovid to hit upon. All they have to do is create a method to see the current TOCs for journals indexed in MEDLINE, a library's link resolver would direct the users to the correct method of full text access. Just because I mentioned database companies doesn't mean the link resolver companies couldn't do this as well. Who knows perhaps a programming librarian could create a neat little customizable mashup that would work effectively.
Until then I will just keep looking for an easy method of accessing the TOCs and the full text articles.
Labels: Publishing Industry, RSS feeds, Technology
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 10:03 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Hello! I tried to do something simmilar for my users: I created a webpage using RSS from the TOC's using Bloglines. It took some time to build it up, but now is working (more or less): http://www.bloglines.com/public/torreviejasalud
I completely agree! There has to be an easier way to sync up database subscriptions with independent journal subscriptions. I would even like a way to search all of the e-textbooks without having to go into each database. So search Access Medicine, StatRef, and MD Consult all from the same spot. But alas, this would mean corporation from all the companies, or maybe some really savvy librarian with mad coding skills could create solution. In the meantime, I rely on memory & excel lists. *Sigh* One day the library will have mashups and aps!
Thank you for the great post,
Alisha
If publishers include DOIs in their feeds (and we're working with CrossRef on recomendations for how to best structure feeds which will cenrtainly recommend that), and if your library has configured a LibX toolbar (and it should because it is free and extremely useful, and there is now a version for IE as well as Firefox), then LibX magically turns DOIs into OpenURL links. Just right-click...
I tell LWW all the time that they are stupid to force institutional subscribers to use the Ovid platform but they don't listen to me...
The bad news is that LWW do not include DOIs (or abstracts, or much at all!) in their TOC feeds from lwwonline.com. However, they do provide DOIs for the small number of titles on HighWire, So with a LibX toolbar installed you can right-click on a DOI in the TOC for, say, Circulation, send the DOI to your link resolver, and get access to the article at Ovid.
The ticTOCs project hasn't just been about building the site and its database, we're also helping publishers to understand how to build their feeds better...
Terry, I like the idea of the tool bar but in most hospitals and many medical institutions, users (including the library) cannot download and install anything, including tool bars on to the institutional computers.
We could have it customized for people for their personal home computers.
I have got to think though that we are kind of in the middle of a tool bar war. Every application has a tool bar to download. Google, Yahoo, delicious, Athens loggin, etc. I have got wonder when people will start to shy away from this type of device.
Have you checked out the recent changes to Ebling Library's RSS and TOC pages?
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