The Lancet's New Online Medical Journal Helps Clinicians And Medical Researchers Find Practice-changing Evidence Quickly And Easily

Main Category: Public Health
Also Included In: Medical Students / Training
Article Date: 30 Oct 2008 - 2:00 PST

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The Lancet, the world's leading independent suite of medical journals, today announced the relaunch of its online medical journals at TheLancet.com. Owned by Elsevier, the world's leading scientific, medical and technical publisher, TheLancet.com is the company's latest solution for delivering flagship medical journal content in daily, contextualised updates for the clinical community.

Unique benefits for busy clinicians and medical researchers

The site provides three unique benefits for busy hospital clinicians and medical researchers:

- Quick and easy access to daily online first research published across The Lancet journals (The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, The Lancet Neurology and The Lancet Oncology).

- Free access to exclusive online-only editorial analysis of how the most important published research impacts practice.

- Specialty-specific article collections from across The Lancet journals, providing immediately relevant updates for specialists will be launched over the coming months.

" TheLancet.com is critical to fulfilling The Lancet's mission to improve patient care and public health, nationally and internationally," said Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief.

"We bring new research and leading insights from remarkable scientists to clinicians quickly, with the intention to help thinking, practice, and policy making. The way we have organised our information we hope will maximise the impact of that work. Our goal is to foster the generation of reliable clinical evidence and the application of that evidence at the point where doctors need it most, whether in high, middle, or low resource settings. Scientific knowledge is truly global. We wish to dedicate The Lancet to a more healthy, sustainable, and equitable world. TheLancet.com is an important part of that vision."

Online medical journals: utilising industry-leading web technologies

Incorporating input from 100 medical students, clinicians, senior consultants, medical researchers and top academics from all over the world, TheLancet.com is built with industry-leading web technologies such as J2EE, Spring, Ajax and MarkLogic XML database functionality to create a fast and intuitive interactive online resource. TheLancet.com has been developed using best-practice Agile processes, resulting in a lean and efficient site that delivers an optimal user experience.

Performance enhancements to TheLancet.com include:

- Instantaneous loading of tables of contents and articles, with tabulated search results that enable swift reviewing and sorting by date, type, relevance and numbers of citations.

- New article previews from the table of contents and search results pages, along with online-only 'Editors' Notes' that help users assess the relevance of the full text article quickly and easily.

- One-click access to current online medical journal issues, with past issues accessible in one view from the current issue page.

- Fully integrated RSS and social bookmarking tools, including Elsevier's 2Collab social networking tool, and with citations from the universal Scopus article citation database to be added soon.

- E-Commerce and customer service features, including the ability to self-edit user profiles.

Valuable editorial analyses and online multimedia content

Other site features that add value to core journal content include Editor's Choices for each journal, additional editorial analysis, 'This Week in Medicine' news, video in collaboration with Global Health TV, and weekly podcasts. Additional online community features planned for the site include social networking, debates, wikis and discussion boards.

Article Collections in core therapeutic areas from across all Lancet journals will be launched in the coming months.

As a cutting-edge online medical journal, TheLancet.com will help users make a difference for patients by enabling medical professionals to work faster, smarter and more efficiently.

Dr Anne Szarewski, clinical consultant at Cancer Research UK and one of the development partners, commented: "I appreciate the fact that TheLancet.com is so quick and simple. I don't want to have hassle; I'm not interested in how the process works, so I just want it done and dusted and on to the next thing."

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus , bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Source
Harriet Bell
The Lancet
Elsevier
The Lancet