My two recent posts - Literature searching and the ideal researcher, and Country wide access to databases / journals: an urgent need both brought in several comments and I thank every reader for these. We will be compiling the comments to see how we should move ahead. I am also happy to add that since my last posts, I have learned of one important development - that AIIMS Delhi and PGI Chandigarh are the first academic libraries in India to subscribe to EMBASE! I learned this at an event I attended at AIIMS Delhi last month. In fact this institution's library has access…

In 2013, I  had written a blog post - Can you get me this article please?  where I had mentioned about the struggle for getting full text articles, especially if one is not attached to a library that subscribes to several journals. Anyone who keeps up with published literature, carries out research or writes for publication, will obviously read articles. And rightly so. In five years, I believe that some libraries in India would have added more journals to their subscriptions. I am sure many have not added more. Some would have even cut down on their list. Irrespective of…

A student, academician or a practitioner of any health sciences stream often needs to search the literature. An ideal researcher should spend a small percentage of time in this activity, and much more on the main research and writing. What is the profile of an ideal researcher in this context?  Someone who has the "information needs", clearly laid out.  Before searching the literature, one has to document the information need clearly. We need to identify literature to reference in the a) introduction and discussion areas, and b) literature that would be closest to our main area of work. The literature…