Web sources for journal abbreviations

[Thomas L. Mead]

On 11/17/98, Ashton, Jason wrote:
>I am seeking sources on the web for journal abbreviations. For conversion >either way.

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I would also be interested in any web-pages which list journal names & abbreviations.   (I'd really like to see the BIOSIS list, called "Serial Sources" appear on the web for free.  If you see it, let me know!)

I made a web page of the ones I know about, but more would be better.

Feel free:   

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~biomed/refstart/jourabbrev/jours.html

On that page there are links to:

*PubMed Journal Database Browser
*a similar database at Ohio State University... 
*list of journals indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI)
*a long list I made up from SERLINE (NLM)  (because "searching" sometimes just doesn't work and you need a big long list to scan visually...)
              

For certain special projects I have gone to the SERLINE file on the MEDLARS system (National Library of Medicine) -- telnet to medlars.nlm.nih.gov   -- (but a name & password is required.)

When there, if you knew all the tricks, you could search their huge serials file.   The number 60,000 comes to mind, but whatever it is, it's WAY MORE than what is indexed in MEDLINE, which is circa 3900, I think.   (You can do cool things like get all the journals that are indexed in Excerpta Medica BUT NOT Medline.    And you can get lists of journals by subject.  I like to go there to see where a journal is indexed.  The "AI" field (abstracting & indexing) is the key... 

Here is the "AI" data for the journal "JAMA"

AI  - IM
AI  - BA
AI  - AIM
AI  - CXP
AI  - CA
AI  - MED
AI  - PA
AI  - CNL
AI  - EM

Hence, Jama is indexed in Index Medicus; Biological Abstracts; the dead Abridged Index Medicus (but it's still a handy Medline "limit" trick); CXP, whatever that means; Chemical Abstracts; Medline (ever so slightly different from Index Medicus); Psychological Abstracts; CINAHL; Excerpta Medica

(I would love to know how accurate this is. It can't be perfect, of course.  They left out ISI resources.   They'd have to fuss with this every year.  Nasty work...)

Anyway, you could get a bunch of records from SERLINE, all in a set, and then make it display TI and TA, and you'd get something like this:

1
TI  - New England Journal of Medicine
TA  - N Engl J Med

etc. etc. etc.

In nerdier, geekier days, I did subject searches in SERLINE and then formulated the resulting text file in a way such that it would plug into ENDNOTE somehow, making a "JOURNALS LIST" so that when you're outputting bibliographies and you want a "full" journal name, it can do it, and if you want the "abbreviated" name, it can do that also.  I'd make a big bunch that a pediatrician (let's say) would like to have and use.  And then a different bunch for a radiologist.  Etc. etc.   WHERE DID I FIND THE TIME FOR THIS!?   No more.

[This was a fine idea theoretically, with typed-in references, but it went all ta hell when we were dealing with imported references (which now everybody does when playing with EndNote, Reference Manager, Pro-Cite, etc.)]

I'm drifting; I'd better get off.

-- Tom Mead
tom.mead at dartmouth.edu