In January 1992, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery was among the first medical journals to produce a full-text version on CD-ROM. At that time, the text of the American volume of The Journal from 1983 through 1990 and the images from 1990 were included on a single disk. The British volume CD-ROM first appeared in 1993 and included text from 1985 through 1992. The CDs have been updated on a regular basis; the current American volume disk contains the full text from 1983 through 1996 as well as the images from 1990 through 1996, and the British volume disk contains the full text from 1984 through 1996 as well as the images from 1993 through 1996.
A second major step was taken in 1996, when The Journal's home pages went on-line at http://www.jbjs.org and http://www.jbjs.co.uk. The home pages include the Table of Contents and abstracts from the last several issues of The Journal as well as other information.
It is time to take the next logical step. A quarterly electronic subscription to both journals on CD-ROM has been developed, and the first disk will be available this month. The disk contains the full text and illustrations from both the American volume and the British volume for 1996 as well as the material from the first quarter of 1997. It also provides added value in that Medline® abstracts of articles listed in the references are included when such abstracts are available from Medline®. The disk includes a number of other features, such as fuzzy-logic text-searching, relevance-ranked document retrieval, full indexing of all important text words, and gray-scale and color images as well as line art. The Table of Contents allows the reader to quickly view a list of all of the articles in a particular issue. Images may be viewed as thumbnails, at standard size, and at double size. Within the text, links to images, charts, graphs, tables, and bibliographic references help the user to find information rapidly.
This next step is intended to provide The Journal to readers in a form that is most useful for rapid retrieval of information. The addition of Medline® abstracts allows a more comprehensive summary of material listed in the references than is possible in the print version of The Journal.
This step is but one of many along the road of electronic publication. The Journal will continue to be in the forefront of orthopaedic education to help practitioners improve their care of patients.
Henry R. Cowell, M.D., Ph.D.
Editor