OTdirect: Links: Journals

On-Line Occupational Therapy Journals

Members of BAOT/COT receive the BJOT each month but if you are running a journal club or researching to improve evidence based practice you will probably want to look further. Each journal has a Journal Citation Reports Impact Factor rating. This rating is based on how often articles from a given journal are cited in other peer-reviewed journals. The rating is intended to give a broad indication of how well regarded and reliable the journal is, though in reality you will need to assess each article on its own merits. New journals or journals that cover esoteric subjects will probably have a low impact rating, though they may well contain useful articles.

In order to search for journal articles relevant to your field of interest you will need access to databases that allow you to search using keywords. Everyone has access to Medline via medlineplus.gov but you will probably want to search other databases also. Occupational Therapists working in the NHS or social services in the UK can use the clinical databases at the National electronic Library for Health (www.nelh.nhs.uk) to search Medline, Cinahl, Psycinfo, Embase, AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine), British Nursing Index and DH-Data and Images MD as well as a range of other resources. To do this you need an Athens password which is issued from your local medical library. For example, when reworking the journal club in the social services team in which I work, we were able to register our Occupational Therapists with the library of our local primary care trust which issued us all Athens passwords. This appears to be the best route to finding journal articles relevant to our work.

You can also use your Athens password to get access to full-text journals including CJOT and OT International via Proquest by logging into www.athensams.net/myathens. This will also get you access to Ovid and other resources Thanks to Marion Wotherspoon for telling me about this.

You may also find it useful to use the journals listed below (listed no particular order). If you know of other useful resources, please let us know using the feedback form at the bottom of the page.