Historical Journal Archive database

A shout out to the three people in the world that may find this post useful…

Herewith a searchable database to research medical journal abbreviations (modern and archaic), with the full formal journal title (no ibid or Loc. cit. here…) and link to Free Open Access FOAMed links for researchers and nerds alike.

Over the last 10 years I have reviewed the original papers for over 7000 medical eponyms to create the eponymictionary. The tedious task of locating the original references for the eponymous terms has been hampered, in part, by the ad hoc, non-unified and inconsistent referencing system applied by referencing authors over the last 250 years.

The Problem:

• Abbreviations change almost with each decade. What seems a rational unified approach in 1890 is refined by 1916 and redundant by 1950. However each journal article referencing prior texts must adhere to the principal of the time.
• Journals change name, location of publication and language of publication frequent basis
• Once you have found the abbreviation and translated into long form – the next challenge is to find the text in an online open source format to read and review

The solution

• Create a database with the current National Library of Medicine (NLM) referencing system, and add all historic alternate referencing options in hidden search fields
• Disambiguate prior similar title texts with city of publication e.g. Arch Med (NY), Arch Med (Lond), Arch Med (Paris)
• Collate all alternate formats for common titles e.g. Zeitung (Z, Zeit, Zeitg) or Zeitschrift (Z, Zeits, Ztschr, Zeitschr) to reduce search issues
• Review alternate online historic text archives for each journal and provide inline links to open access articles (e.g. Haithi, Archive, BHL, Gallica, PMC)
• Allow follow through chronological links to antecedent and subsequent journals with name changes and contextual abbreviations detailed

Archaic Journal Archive database

Hopefully this will assist in deciphering the random abbreviations used through the centuries and allow rapid access to free online historic medical journal texts.

The ajax search function is still a little clumsy and so I advise searching small components fo the full journal title or abbreviation to get the best results. This is iteration one, with the first 1000 journals listed…more to come

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Open access resources for historic medical journal articles

• Haithi: the HaithiTrust online journal repository a huge resource.
• Archive: the Internet Archive and its huge collections of journals
• NLM: the National Library of Medicine to garner more information on journal associations
• BHL: the Biodiversity Heritage Library with 63 million pages
• BnF: Gallica digital library with 10 million pages in French
• Other: Alternate free resources such as Pubmed Central PMC and official journal websites

Common stumbling blocks

• Ibid. (Latin ibīdem, for ‘in the same place‘, commonly used in a footnote, or reference to refer to the source cited in the preceding note or list item.
• Loc. cit. (Latin loco citato) for ‘in the place cited‘ is a term used to repeat the title and page number for a given work and author. Loc. cit. is used in place of ibid. when the reference is not only to the work immediately preceding, but also refers to the same page.  
• op. cit. (Latin opere citato) for ‘in the work cited‘, in which reference is made to a work previously cited, but to a different page within that work.

Not an exhaustive list by any means, but each time I need to find an obscure journal referenced an even more obscure article, I record the abbreviation, the abbreviation synonyms and the FOAM resources which provide open access articles.

…in the hope that may be of benefit to somebody…somewhere