23 Dec 2021
Vet and lecturer Simon Cook develops VetLit to provide latest veterinary literature from popular journals and allows users to search by speciality.
Paul Imrie
Job Title
A free online resource that keeps all veterinary literature together in one place has been launched by a vet and RVC lecturer.
VetLit (vetlit.org) will be continuously updated with publications from a large number of peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Small Animal Practice, Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine (JVIM) and Journal of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care.
The journals covered include many tailored towards the reading lists of speciality college residency training programmes.
A monthly newsletter featuring interesting and important articles and can be signed up to at the website homepage, or articles can be found via updates on social media, including Twitter (@vetlit_articles).
The resource has been created by Simon Cook, lecturer in emergency and critical care at the RVC. Mr Cook said: “VetLit was originally designed to help those in post graduate training and so the sections (emergency and critical care, neurology, anaesthesia etc) include the journals required for board examinations in that discipline – you may choose to follow a particular page based on your own interests.”
He added: “Historically, many veterinary journals have required institutional access or paid subscriptions. However, more and more are now becoming ‘open access’ meaning that they are free to view.
“Popular open access journals include JVIM, Frontiers and PLOS One. Whether you have access to the articles or not, seeing what is being published and reading the abstracts is still of great value.
“Remember also that private study can form part of our annual CPD requirements; an hour or so reading journal articles each month would be an excellent use of that study time. Aside from learning a take-home message from a publication, there is often a useful literature review in the introduction to any article.”
