New Design for ALTBIB (Bibliography on Alternatives to the Use of Live Vertebrates in Biomedical Research and Testing)

[This Technical Note is a reprint of an announcement published on NLM-Tox-Enviro-Health-L, an e-mail announcement list available from the NLM Division of Specialized Information Services. To subscribe to this list, please see //sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/envirolistserv.html.]

Obtaining relevant information on animal alternatives from MEDLINE® /PubMed® can be challenging. For this reason, the NLM® now offers automated MEDLINE/PubMed filtered searches for relevant citations. Users can also further limit their search (via checkboxes) to citations with the "Animal Use Alternatives" MeSH® term, to the PubMed Toxicology Subset, and to citations published after 2000 (//toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/altbib.html).

For information prior to 2001, users can search ALTBIB, NLM's bibliographic collection on alternatives to animal testing. It includes citations from published articles, books, book chapters, and technical reports from 1992 to 2001. The bibliography contains citations on methods, tests, assays, and procedures that may be useful in establishing alternatives to the use of intact vertebrates.

In 2001, MEDLINE incorporated several enhancements to facilitate the information retrieval of animal alternatives literature, such as adding MeSH main headings on the animal alternatives subjects and indexing more journals relevant to animal alternatives. Since the introduction of these new enhancements, ALTBIB has not been updated.

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