Psychiatryonline Web Site Gets User-Friendly Makeover
It's a dream come true for clinicians, researchers, and authors: the newly redesigned journals Web site at<www.psychiatryonline.org> has fine-tuned the methods readers can use to access Psychiatric News and the journals published by APA and American Psychiatric Publishing inc. (APPI). Moreover, each publication has a redesigned homepage that is more attractive and easier to navigate.
The redesigned homepages of the APA/APPI publications are easy to use and offer time-saving features.
“In addition to giving our journals Web site a clean new look, we've improved users' ability to navigate the site,” explained Pam Harley, APPI's e-publishing strategist. “Visitors will find that, whatever strategy they use to look for what they're after, they'll spend less time and effort finding the precise—and related—information they need.”
APA members have free access to the American Journal of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Services once they activate their subscriptions. Access to Psychiatric News is also free and does not require activation. The other publications at the site are FOCUS: The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, Academic Psychiatry, Journal of Neuropsychiatry, Clinical Neurosciences, and Psychosomatics.
In addition to the redesign, APPI recently completed a project to make the historical archives of almost all of its journals available to subscribers. In the case of the American Journal of Psychiatry, that means readers now have access to articles that go back as far as 1844, when the first issue was published.
The site serves as a valuable portal to other published research as well. Hyperlinks from cited references to the articles to which they refer allow readers to move easily through related literature. Links from references to popular indexing services such as PubMed and CrossRef help researchers locate cited articles.
In addition, an innovative “link exchange” program with other leading medical journals hosted by HighWire Press allows limited free access to single articles cited by the original article. Such access is noted by the“ Free Full Text” links in the references of APPI journals. Links from articles to other articles on the same topic and by the same lead investigators are also offered.
A useful tool for authors is the ability to export article citations to popular bibliographic management software formats like EndNote and RefWorks. Such programs allow authors to create a personal database of references and generate bibliographies in the varied formats required by publishers. Authors who use these programs to organize their references report that they reduce errors and minimize article prep time, Harley said.
Visitors can sign up to receive e-mail alerts whenever new content is published that matches criteria based on the topics, authors, and articles they want to track. They can also save links to articles and complicated searches to user-defined folders for future reference.
“The online journals offer a state-of-the-art environment for discovery and management of journal literature,” Harley added.“ With our recent redesign, the site is now an even easier-to-use and far-ranging information portal. I encourage subscribers who haven't done so already to activate their online access to the journals to which they subscribe. We think they will like what they find.”
The updated Web site can be accessed at<www.psychiatryonline.org>. Each publication can be accessed by clicking on its cover. ▪
