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Bio-Medical Ethics Resources at the Tucker Medical Library

web sites | databases | books | journals

Web sites

The Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Institute of Ethics

  • The Kennedy Institute was established at Georgetown University in 1971 and is a teaching and research center offering ethical perspectives on major policy issues. It is the largest university based group of faculty members in the world devoted to research and teaching in biomedical ethics and other areas of applied ethics. The Kennedy Institute Library and Information Services, operates the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, among other projects.
  • The Library and Information Services accesses the most extensive library of ethics in the world, the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature. It is a specialized collection of books, journals, web resources and other relevant documents concerned with issues in biomedical and professional ethics. The library holdings represent the world's largest collection related to ethical issues in medicine and biomedical research.
  • The Institute produced BIOETHICSLINE, an online bibliographic database, for the National Library of Medicine. It was freely available for searching on the World Wide Web. On September 28, 2001, it was taken off the Web as a separate database and combined with PubMed. It can be searched as a "subset". See below under databases for detail
  • The National Information Resource on Ethics & Human Genetics supports information services on topics related to ethics and human genetics.

Research Ethics Program, University of California, San Diego

  • http://ethics.ucsd.edu
  • The UCSD Research Ethics Program was created in 1997. The purpose of the Program is to help foster the responsible conduct of research and to meet regulatory requirements. Activities of the Program include the teaching of several courses, organizing workshops and seminar series, and providing assistance with locating and using resources for instruction in research ethics. The Program is jointly sponsored by the Office of Graduate Studies and Research and the School of Medicine. The site has course syllabi posted online on these subjects and more: Ethics and Survival Skills in Academia, Scientific Communication, Scientific Ethics, and Scientific Integrity.

BioethicsWeb (6/8/04)

  • http://bioethicsweb.ac.uk/
  • BioethicsWeb is a gateway to evaluated, quality Internet resources relating to biomedical ethics, including ethical, social, legal and public policy questions arising from advances in medicine and biology, issues relating to the conduct of biomedical research and approaches to bioethics. BioethicsWeb is affiliated to the BIOME life sciences hub and the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), but is developed and managed by the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine at the Wellcome Trust.

The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science

  • http://onlineethics.org/
  • Their mission is to provide engineers, scientists, and science and engineering students with resources for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems that arise in their work, and to serve those who are promoting learning and advancing the understanding of responsible research and practice in science and engineering. They occasionally sponsor conferences located in physical space, such as the International Conference on Ethics in Engineering and Computer Science in 1999. In other respects, the Online Ethics Center exists only in "cyberspace" and provides materials exclusively by posting them on these pages.

Databases

MEDLINE

A MEDLINE search on topics related to ethics will allow access to a variety of journals. Click here for National Jewish Health information on MEDLINE access and on tips for searching help. For National Jewish Health Staff, if you prefer, the library staff can do a search for you. See our Expert Search Services or call the Tucker Medical Library for information at x1482.

BIOETHICSLINE

The Institute produced BIOETHICSLINE, an online bibliographic database, for the National Library of Medicine. It was freely available for searching on the World Wide Web. On September 28, 2001, it was taken off the Web as a separate database and combined with PubMed, where it can be searched as a "subset," and LocatorPlus where books can be found.

Produced jointly by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the National Library of Medicine, the BIOETHICSLINE database includes English-language materials on bioethics. Documents are selected from the disciplines of medicine, nursing, biology, philosophy, religion, law, and the behavioral sciences. Selections from popular literature are also included. Covered document types include journal and newspaper articles, monographs, court decisions, bills, laws, and audiovisual materials. Approximately 100 primary sources and 40 indexes and databases are scanned for citations. The main power of BIOETHICSLINE was that it indexed social science journals as well as medical journals.

The "Bioethics Subset" strategy has been added to the PubMed limits menu and should prove helpful for monitoring recent and emerging literature.

The Bioethics Subset is a search limiter designed to help users focus their search results on bioethical issues when searching the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. (http://pubmed.gov) (on Campus use http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=njclib to access indications of journal holdings).

The Bioethics subset is based on a pre-built strategy that looks for

  • journals that commonly publish articles on bioethics,
  • Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms used most often to index these articles (both as unique terms and in combination with other terms),
  • frequently used ethics-related text words, and
  • any records indexed by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics bibliographers.

When searching PubMed, the Bioethics Subset can be used to restrict retrieval results by specifying it as a limit from the Subsets pull-down menu (PubMed help on Subsets). Other limits may be chosen as well to further refine the results (PubMed help on Limits).

The Bioethics Subset also can be employed as part of the search statement itself by combining the term bioethics with the delimiter [sb]. For example:

AUTONOMY and BIOETHICS[sb]

To review the structure of the bioethics subset, go to http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed_subsets/bioethics_strategy.html

The resources of BIOETHICSLINE were moved to NLM's PubMed for journal articles (see URLs above) and LocatorPlus for books and audiovisuals. The power of the expanded scope of BIOETHICSLINE is no longer available easily on the web.

The reference librarians at the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature encourage you to use their free reference service by calling 1-800-MED-ETHX (1-800-633-3849) or filling out a form at their site. They will search the question for you using their extensive in-house databases that were used to build the BIOETHICSLINE database and continue to contribute to PubMed and LocatorPlus.

National Jewish Health Faculty, and others who are affiliated with UCHSC, can search a closed file of BIOETHICSLINE at the UCHSC OVID Gateway. (Information on Ovid) This file has material from 1973 to December 2000 but most of 2000 is not covered. It still is a good resource for older material. There are about 3000 records a year. For more information about the Ovid product, after entering Ovid on the Web, use the "I" for information button found on the "choose a database" page.

Books

  • The Tucker Medical Library catalog, Impulse, can be searched using a 'MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) Search' and the heading, 'ethics.' Click here for a search of the ethics books the Tucker Library owns.
  • It is also possible to do a 'Word Search' in Impulse using, 'ethic* or bioethic*'. To see the above MeSH search plus a few additional peripheral citations, click here.
  • Link to Impulse to search more broadly for books that UCHSC and other participating libraries own, using the search tips above.
  • Link to the Tucker Library Catalogs page to search the library catalogs at Prospector, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and WorldCat at FirstSearch.

Journals

  • Online Journals. From any campus computer, go to the E-Journal Finder:
    Search using "title contains all words" for ethic or ethics. Or for the title of the journal.

BMC Medical Ethics

Ethic@: An International Journal for Moral Philosophy

Hastings Center Report

Internet Health: Journal on Medical Internet Research, Applications, Communication and Ethics
JONA'S healthcare law, ethics, and regulation

Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics

Nursing Ethics

Note: This information is provided to you as an educational service of National Jewish Health. It is not meant to be a substitute for consulting with your own physician.

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