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New Avenues to Older Journal LiteratureOlder journal literature can be an important resource for answering contemporary scientific questions. While many electronic journals are available only as far back as the mid-1990s, recent additions of backfiles allow access to the archives of important journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and many more. Full-text articles from the electronic version of the science journal Nature are now available to HSLS patrons back through 1987. Both Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed citations provide corresponding links to this older literature. Full-text content of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is now accessible historically to 1915 (volume 1, issue 1) via Ovid MEDLINE or the PNAS Web site <www.pnas.org>. Individual issues of both Nature and PNAS may be browsed via PITTCat for the Health Sciences <http://pittcat.hsls.pitt.edu/>, or the HSLS E-Journals list at <www.hsls.pitt.edu/resources/ejournals/titles>. PubMed Central (PMC), an archival database of several hundred thousand full-text life sciences articles, provides another option for accessing older journal literature. It is produced by the National Center for Biotechnology, a division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Historical coverage of journal literature in PMC varies — some dating back to the early 1900s, with the eventual goal of providing electronic access to all journal issues archived at PMC. Examples of indexed journals include Journal of Bacteriology since 1916, Infection & Immunity since 1970, and Cell Regulation since 1989 (published as Molecular Biology of the Cell since 1992). Most PMC articles have a corresponding entry in the PubMed database. However, at the present time, PubMed citations for articles published before 1966 do not link to the corresponding full text article in PubMed Central. Citations and links for these pre-1966 articles will be selectively added to PubMed, beginning later this year. To access PMC journals, use the PubMed Central link located under Related Resources on the left side menu of the PubMed home page. PMC can be searched as a database by using either the basic or advanced search features available on the PMC home page. Providers of full-text articles are working to add more early print issues to their collections because the importance of this literature in answering today’s biomedical questions is immeasurable.
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