BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned. Many journals operate traditional anonymous peer review. Others, including the medical BMC-series titles, operate 'open peer review', in which reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. For these titles, the pre-publication history of each paper (including submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses) is linked to from the published article. BioMed Central's portfolio of 186 journals includes general titles such as Journal of Biology alongside specialist journals (e.g. BMC Bioinformatics, Malaria Journal) that focus on particular disciplines.
All the research published by BioMed Central's journals is open access, but BioMed Central also provides access to various additional products and services that require a subscription. For example, certain BioMed Central journals such as Genome Biology publish commissioned review content available only to subscribers. Other subscription-only products include Faculty of 1000, a literature evaluation service that covers both biology and medicine. BioMed Central also operates Open Repository, a hosted digital repository solution for institutions.
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- Click on the advanced search tab located near the top of the page. Type your search terms in the four empty boxes, one or more per box. With the menus at the left of each box you can restrict to a specific field: author, title etc. The menus at the right determine what happens if the box contains more than one word. All words: will return articles that contain all words, anywhere in the requested field. Any word: will return articles that contain at least one of the words in the requested field. Exact phrase: will return articles where the words appear as a continuous phrase in the requested field.
- For author searches, use the format smith_cp. Author names are automatically expanded to include all combinations of initials, e.g. smith_c returns Smith C, Smith CA etc. You can turn this off by using exact phrase (instead of all words/any word)
- A question mark stands for any single character. An asterisk stands for any number of characters. These wildcards can be used at the end of a search term, and also at the beginning or in the middle of a word. The search may be slower in these cases. Examples: tumo* retrieves tumor, tumour, tumors, tumours, tumorigenisis, tumoricidal etc. nf* retrieves NF-κB, NFκB, NF-kB, NFkappaB, NF1 etc. j*son retrieves Johnson, Jonson, Janson, Jenson, Jackson, Johanson etc. j?nson retrieves Jonson, Janson, Jenson etc., but not Johnson.
Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter B and select BioMed Central.
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