WHAMMA JAMA: ONLINE JOURNAL OF THE AMA
McConnell Library provides online access to thousands of different journals covering all academic disciplines. Some of these titles, while very useful to researchers and students in a given discipline, are not always widely known outside of that discipline. Then there are some prestigious, interdisciplinary journals which are well recognized and heavily used by students and faculty in many departments. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is one such journal, and because of this, McConnell Library staff recently made special arrangements to use funds donated to the Radford University Foundation for the Library in support of scholarship to purchase online access to JAMA.
JAMA is one of the most well-known and well-respected journals in the health science literature. The fact that JAMA is a general medical journal (as opposed to a medical specialty journal like GASTROENTEROLOGY & HEPATOLOGY) means that it covers a wide range of health science topics. JAMA includes a good number of articles which reach beyond purely medical topics to broader public health topics. For example, articles have appeared recently in JAMA dealing with how people search for health information online and on the drinking behavior of students on college campuses.
One of the reasons it is so important for the library to provide online access to JAMA is that it is one of the most widely indexed journals. This means that whether students are searching in Medline, Cinahl, PsycInfo, or even InfoTrac, they will come across abstracts to JAMA articles. JAMA is also one of the most often cited journals, which means that whether students are reading an article in Psychology Today or their textbook, they are likely to come across a citation from JAMA. With all of these various entry points, a large number of students and faculty will find citations or abstracts for articles from JAMA, and they will then hunger for the full text of those articles right on their screen. This is exactly what McConnell library provides with the subscription to the online version of JAMA.
Kevin Tapp - Director, George Harvey Resource Center