Monday, 4 February 2013

IndMED & MedIND Databases

Welcome to IndMED

The purpose of IndMED is to index selected peer reviewed medical journals published from India. It supplements international indexing services like PubMed. It covers about 100 journals indexed from 1985 onwards.
IndMED has been produced under an ICMR funded project - "National Databases of Indian Medical Journals". Another resource produced under this project is a portal of full text articles (medIND) of select Indian medical journals indexed in IndMED or PubMed.

From 1986 to 31st March 2009, National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had collaborated to setup ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information. The Centre, known as Indian Medlars Centre, provided information support services to medical research community. It also produced two important resources:
  • A bibliographic database - IndMED - by indexing about 100 Indian medical journals.
  • A portal - medIND - providing free full text access to 62 Indian medical journals.
For continuing the maintaining, updating and improvising these two important national resources, ICMR funded a new project (National Databases of Indian Medical Journals) in 2010.

IndMED:

Research methodology requires literature survey related to the research problem being investigated. Bibliographical databases, also known as indexing and abstracting services - are the first-line tools used by researchers for literature survey. Medical Researchers normally start with searching internal indexing services like PubMed. PubMed is a well known indexing service of Medical Journals produced by US National Library of Medicine. It comprises more than 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Although it is the best known tool for conducting literature survey for medical research, researcher often supplement their search results with similar regional and national databases. IndMED aims to supplement the literature surveys with Indian references. Moreover, it would be of immense use for researchers on diseases and medical problems more prevalent in India than in other developed countries.
IndMED started indexing journals from 1985 onwards. Journals are selected for indexing after a comprehensive review a selection committee from time to time. Selected journals are also reviewed periodically.

MedIND:

Indian medical community produce half the articles published from the third world yet only two percent of the papers get noticed by international medical community. Poorly developed Indian medical journal publishing industry is also responsible for the poor visibility of research published from Indian. Most journals are society journals. They seldom have overseas subscription agents for distributing journals. This results in very poor circulation of Indian journals overseas. However, omnipresent Internet has provided an opportunity to Indian Medical Journals to over this handicap. It has been shown time and again that better online exposure leads to appreciation and citations to articles. MedIND aims to provide online exposure to those indexed Indian medical journals willing to provide free full text access to there articles.

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