NCBI Bookshelf. A service of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.
Bookshelf Help [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Center for Biotechnology Information (US); 2005-.
This living document contains a collection of discovery guides and queries that can help you find various types of biomedical, life sciences, and healthcare literature held in the NCBI Bookshelf.
Discovery by Subject
Subject Queries
The following are queries to help you find information indexed in Bookshelf on a variety of subjects.
The information is from content sources collected by the National Library of Medicine and in scope for Bookshelf. including clinical guidelines, systematic reviews, monographs, textbooks, and other content types deposited by publishers, funders, and funded authors. These queries may be refined by combining them with Bookshelf format queries relevant to your search.
These queries were developed to return the most relevant, rather that the most comprehensive, results on a subject. Bookshelf’s default relevance search algorithm searches all indexed fields and ranks results by the highest of times a term appears in the full-text content. These queries restrict the search scope to title, abstract, and available MeSH terms provided by NLM cataloguers, and available keywords provided by authors and publishers, resulting in a more targeted results.
Toxicology Discovery Guide
Bookshelf has a substantial collection of toxicology literature. The following goes into more detail about this collection and how to discover this content in Bookshelf.
What Toxicology content is collected by NLM?
According to the American College of Medical Toxicologists, medical toxicology is a field of medicine dedicated to the evaluation and treatment of poisoned patients. Some of the problems they evaluate include unintentional and intentional overdoses, exposure to industrial chemical products and environmental hazards, substance use disorder management, diagnosis and management of certain exposures, and independent medical examinations to assess injury or disability resulting from toxic exposures. Please see the NLM guidelines for toxicology for additional information on the scope of collecting toxicology content within the National Library of Medicine.
How can I find Toxicology content in Bookshelf?
Using Advanced Search
To start exploring Toxicology resources within NCBI Bookshelf, go to the advanced search feature.
Step 1: Change the Builder drop down menu to “Resource Type”
Step 2: Click “Show index list”
Step 3: Select “toxicology resource” from the list
You end up with the following query: “toxicology resources”[Resource Type]
Note: You can build a more specific search by contributing relevant keywords surrounding your topic within the second search field
Using Browse Titles
- You can browse titles in Bookshelf from specific publishers. On the Bookshelf homepage, under the search bar, click “Browse Titles”. Then, select a publisher from the “Publishers” box on the left-hand side of the screen. Or enter some search terms and then limit your results to a specific publisher. Note that you can also narrow down your search by resource types within the “Types” box on the left-hand side of the screen. Learn more about browsing in the Bookshelf Help guide.
What formats of Toxicology content does Bookshelf collect?
Bookshelf includes full-text toxicology reports, assessments, and technical reports. On the left sidebar in Bookshelf, you can filter results by the following types of content.
Report - Technical reports detail the progress or results of scientific, technical, or policy research and are usually published in response to a narrowly defined research need. Reports in Bookshelf also include systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines.
Systematic reviews are characterized by a methodical and replicable methodology and presentation. They involve a comprehensive search to locate all relevant published and unpublished work on a subject; a systematic integration of search results; and a critique of the extent, nature, and quality of evidence in relation to a particular research question.
Clinical practice guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances.
Book – Publications that are complete in one volume or a limited number of volumes. In Bookshelf this includes multi-chapter monographs, contributed reference books, and contributed funded chapters.
Collection – A collection of similarly developed and reviewed publications of a similar format funded by the same funder or published by the same publisher.
Documentation – Documentation about a program, product, or service of the National Library of Medicine.
Database – A database is a collection of individual records (often categorized by subject matter) that are most often standardized in both format and content. LiverTox and LactMed are the main databases for toxicology content in the NCBI Bookshelf.
Where does Toxicology content in Bookshelf come from?
The NCBI Bookshelf is not an author or publisher of Toxicology content but enters into agreements with scholarly and non-commercial publishers like government agencies and NGOs of this kind of content to make it accessible and discoverable through its full-text repository.
Some of the main contributors of Toxicology assessments, reviews, and other reports in Bookshelf include the following agencies along with a PubMed query to find their selected full-text content Bookshelf indexed in PubMed:
Discovery by Format
Bookshelf Format Queries
The following are queries for you to find reference information indexed in Bookshelf in formats in scope for Bookshelf. These queries may be refined by combining them with the Bookshelf reference queries relevant to your search.
These queries were developed to assist users to find relevant content according to meaningful MeSH publication types or other formats both meaningful to users and that are significant to the Bookshelf collection.
Textbooks & Reference Works Discovery Guide
Textbooks and reference works are the most heavily accessed content in Bookshelf. This has been the case throughout Bookshelf’s history. In fact, Bookshelf started in 1999 with Alberts’ Molecular Biology of the Cell to provide quality reference information to support the understanding of original studies and reviews indexed in PubMed.
What do textbooks & reference works mean in Bookshelf?
While there is much overlap between the two, textbooks are edited primarily for educational purposes and reference works are contributed monographs, edited works, or collections of structured reviews with many contributors that are used for research, education, and health professional practice.
How to find textbooks & reference works in Bookshelf?
Using Advanced Search
To start exploring the textbooks or reference books within NCBI Bookshelf, go to the advanced search feature.
Step 1: Change the Builder drop down menu to “Resource Type”
Step 2: Click “Show index list”
Step 3: Select “textbooks” or “reference works” from the list
Browsing titles via subjects
NCBI Bookshelf has a variety of textbooks that you can navigate by subject. You can do this searching in the ‘Browse Titles’ section of Bookshelf. Below you can find links to our top books within our most popular subjects.
Step 1: Navigate to “Browse Titles”
Step 2: Enter search term (subject of interest)
Step 3: Select ‘Book’ from the Types menu
Clinical Guidelines and Systematic Reviews Discovery Guide
Bookshelf has an extensive collection of Clinical Guidelines and Systematic Reviews.
What are Clinical Guidelines and Systematic Reviews?
Clinical guidelines assist the health care practitioner with patient care decisions about appropriate diagnostic, therapeutic, or other clinical procedures for specific clinical circumstances. Trustworthy clinical guidelines are evidence-based and meet the standards of the Institute of Medicine. The evidence on which guidance is based is often published as one or more related systematic review.
Systematic reviews are reviews of the primary literature in health and health policy that attempts to identify, appraise, and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets specified eligibility criteria to answer a given research question. Its conduct uses explicit methods aimed at minimizing bias to produce more reliable findings regarding the effects of interventions for prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation that can be used to inform decision making.
How can I find Clinical Guidelines and Systematic Reviews in Bookshelf?
Using Advanced Search
To start exploring the textbooks or reference books within NCBI Bookshelf, go to the advanced search feature.
Step 1: Change the Builder drop down menu to “Resource Type”
Step 2: Click “Show index list”
Step 3: Select “clinical guidelines” and/or “systematic reviews” from the list
This will result in the following query: "clinical guidelines"[Resource Type] OR "systematic reviews"[Resource Type]
Discovery by Programmatic Access
About 75% of the clinical guidelines and systematic reviews in the Bookshelf collection are also available for mining and reuse through Bookshelf’s FTP service.
To locate a specific title or set of clinical guidelines or systematic reviews via this service refer to this file list updated monthly.
Each list entry includes the following information:
- The fully qualified name of the .tar.gz file for a book, with directory structure
- Citation details:
- Book title
- Publisher
- Publication date
- The accession number for the title which is a unique, persistent ID for the title that can be used to display it in Bookshelf
- Last updated (YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)
- Bookshelf Categories
- Bookshelf Queries and Discovery Guides - Bookshelf HelpBookshelf Queries and Discovery Guides - Bookshelf Help
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