We have been very lucky to secure a year's subscription to
Clinical Key, thanks to generous funding from the
Northamptonshire Health Charitable Fund. It is produced by Elsevier who publish the Lancet and a wealth of well known medical books such as
Kumar & Clark's Clinical Medicine.
Clinical Key is a versatile search engine backed by a huge amount of full text electronic content. It can be used at the point of care for fast overviews, or for more in-depth research or study, making it a valuable resource for consultants, doctors, students, nurses and other clinicians.
Unlike a normal search engine, Clinical Key's smart search is designed to find answers very quickly and to think like a clinician. When you search it recognises relevant clinical concepts, giving you a short cut to the information you need.
You can also filter your search by types of content, books, journal articles, videos etc.
Search results will often lead you to a disease topic page where you will get an overview, including definition, diagnostics, differential diagnosis, imaging and treatment.
Clinical Key contains:
- 1,400 topic pages
- Over 600 electronic journals
- Over 1000 electronic books
- 850 First Consult monographs
- 17,000 + medical / surgical videos
- 300 + Procedures Consult videos
- 15,000 patient education handouts
- 2.2 million images
- You can find a full content list here
As well as reading them online, individual articles (and some book chapters) can be downloaded as .PDF files
Whilst there is no app, Clinical Key is optimised for mobile devices and will work well with the browser on your tablet or phone.
You will also be able to find the full text journal content from Clinical Key when you use
HDAS to search the databases (e.g. Medline or the British Nursing Index) on the
NICE Evidence Services site.
To access Clinical Key all you need is your OpenAthens password (
register online here if you don't have one) to get started.
Clinical Key is a fantastic easy to use resource, full of high quality information from world recognised sources (and if you do get stuck there is a
user guide here).
At the end of our subscription in March 2016 we will be evaluating how much usage Clinical Key has had and deciding whether to fund an ongoing subscription from the Library's budget, so now is your change to try it out and let us know what you think.
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