Did you know that there are citations to medical videos in PubMed? It was news to me and several other librarians today. I was at the New England Journal of Medicine Library Advisory Board today discussing many things, among them the difficulty of finding good medical videos. That is when one of the people with NEJM mention that their Videos in Clinical Medicine, were indexed and in PubMed. Almost all of us were stunned, we said, “No they’re not, we’ve never seen them.” So we grabbed a laptop found the title of one of the videos from the NEJM website and searched for it in PubMed. Low and behold it was in there.
It turns out that videos are being added to PubMed and they are indexed under the Publication Type: Interactive Tutorial which was added to the database in 2008. So why didn’t we librarians in the room know about this? Well if you search for any PubMed citation where the Publication Type is an Interactive Tutorial you will notice that there are only 758 citations. In a database of over 20 million citation, 759 is less than a drop in a bucket. It is more like a drop in the ocean, no wonder we didn’t know the videos were there.
Finding good medical videos is always difficult, it is nice to know that PubMed is indexing some of them and PubMed is another tool for discovering them.
There’s another interesting PT called webcasts. 116, mostly German. Video & audio podcasts.
Are these videos only available to individual subscribers? It us always frustrating to find something indexed – and then the instutional subscriptions don’t include it!