A Visit to the Doctor. Color etching. Thomas Rowlandson, 1818. Courtesy of The National Library of Medicine.

You eat well, you drink well and you sleep well...Depend upon it, I will give you something that shall do away all these things.


Free medical journals on the World Wide Web.

If you need an article from a medical journal, you just might find it free on the World Wide Web!

It is old news to the medical community that the full contents of a number of prestigious journals are absolutely free, the current issue included, with no strings attached. These include American Family Physician, Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Dozens more journals are free electronically after six months or a year. Although most online journals still require a subscription with password, some offer pay-per-view access to their articles cheaper than what you'd pay for gas driving to the nearest medical library. Restricted articles from BMJ (British Medical Journal), for example, are just $4.00 each. The free availability status of electronic medical journals is ever-changing, and keeping up with these changes is like shooting at moving ducks at the carnival. The following Websites, however, provide reasonably up-to-date links to and availability status information about free electronic medical journals:

PubMed LinkOut to free journals
Freemedicaljournals.com
HighWire Press
Periodici Elettronici Biomedici

Another way to find out about the electronic availability of a medical journal is simply to "Google" it. Type its title in quotes at www.google.com. If you find your journal's Website, check to see if some of its contents might be free.

If you happen to be searching the MEDLINE® database at PubMed, PubMed sometimes provides a link to the free full-text source. And here's a clever strategy for locating free journal articles while searching your subject at PubMed. Type in your topic, appended as follows, for example:

reflex symphathetic dystrophy AND free full text [sb]
Realize that the electronic versions of most medical journals go back less than ten years, but there are some surprising exceptions to this, and we will surely continue to see more and more retrospective digitization of the medical journal literature.

Good luck surfing in the rapidly changing waters of electronic medical journals where, if you're lucky, you'll find that coveted article free, just a keystroke away!


MedMatters™
Expert Medical Literature Research for Attorneys
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This Tips for Attorneys page was last updated with links verified by MedMatters on October 16, 2006.


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