Medical journals are primary sources of nuclear medicine information. The most prominent journals are those produced by medical professional societies in the United States and Europe. Refereed journals, those which have a panel of experts determining whether the article will be published, are authoritative. The reputation of the journal is also an important determinant of the authoritativeness of the articles within the journal.
Information concerning helpful legal journals is available under the "Legal Resources" tab above.
A measure of the importance of the journal is the "Impact Factor." The "Impact Factor" is based on how often a journal's articles are cited by other articles.
The clinical medicine journals with the highest impact factors are typically the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.
The journals devoted to nuclear medicine with the highest impact factors are generally the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, The European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Seminars in Nuclear Medicine, and Clinical Nuclear Medicine.
An Impact Factor Tutorial is available for an in-depth explanation.
Additional journals that include clinical nuclear medicine articles (several are also available via EBSCO Host):
AJR: The American Journal of Roentgenology (Amer. Roentgen Ray Society)
Radiology (Radiological Society of North American)
Journal of the American College of Radiology
Nuclear Medicine Communications (British Nuclear Medicine Society)
Nuclear Medicine and Biology (Soc. of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences)
Nuclear Technology (American Nuclear Society)
Health Physics (Health Physics Society)
Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (Korea)
Indian Journal of Nuclear Medicine (India)
Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology (Australia and New Zealand)
The Quarterly Journal of Nuclear Medicine (Italy)
Nuclear Medicine Review (Central and Eastern Europe)
The journals listed here are the most prominent journals devoted to clinical nuclear medicine. One link is provided to each journal's home page. Abstracts of articles are available. Some archived articles may be available in full-text. All of these journals are available in Oklahoma City University Libraries via EBSCO Host.
Online medical journal research is available for free via the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).
The PubMed database includes over 5,400 journals from the U.S. and foreign countries. Abstracts are included. When full-text articles are available for free, PubMed provides links to those sources.
The NLM has extensive resources to help the researcher. PubMed Central has a free archive of life sciences journals that is searchable by journal title. The PubMed Tutorial is worth the the time if you are going to do extensive medical research.
Many articles that discuss nuclear medicine procedures are published in journals of other specialties. Therefore, it is important to use a broad database such as PubMed to find the articles most relevant to your topic. Because of the size of the database, use of some of PubMed's specific tools, such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Qualifiers, will help you search more efficiently.
Also note that if you locate an article using PubMed, the citations include links to full-text articles when they are available.
The National Library of Medicine has developed a Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) index to help with searching. To search for articles dealing with nuclear medicine imaging, limit your search to those with the MeSH heading "Radionuclide Imaging." Alternatively, you could use the "Radionuclide Imaging" qualifier, RI, by typing your search term with "/RI". For example, if you wanted to find information on nuclear medicine imaging for Alzheimer's disease, you could use "alzhezheimer's/RI" as your search.
For articles concerning therapeutic nuclear medicine, you should consider using the MeSH heading for the radioisotope being used along with the Therapeutic Use qualifier, TU.
