Make the most of your membership: ClinicalKey

ClinicalKey is one of the top resources we subscribe to with the aim of supporting our members, guiding them to the resources they need to enhance clinical practice. With ClinicalKey, the library connects you to a clinical search engine that can empower you to make informed, confident decisions by providing fast, relevant knowledge. On ClinicalKey you can find relevant results with integrated search functionality that provides the most trusted information, whilst also delivering the concise answers required, along with comprehensive referential content.

Healthcare information is becoming more complicated and overwhelming as time goes on, one estimate from a report ('Challenges and Opportunities Facing Medical Education', Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, 2011) is that medical information is doubling every 73 days. ClinicalKey combats this complexity by aligning clinical care teams with evidence-based answers across multiple specialties.

We know our members, at all career stages, lead busy, hectic lives, and might miss the benefits afforded by ClinicalKey. To help take advantage of all the site has to offer, we’ve delved into the product so you’ll be equipped with the ideas, resources, and tools you need to get the best from this resource.

Firstly log in as normal on the RCS England website, then follow the link to ClinicalKey on our guide to services, the Surgical Library, or for first time help use the help page: Help logging into ClinicalKey

Once you’ve logged in and clicked through to ClinicalKey, click the ‘log in’ button on the top right of the screen, then choose Open Athens and the College logo should appear on the left hand side of the screen beside the other Elsevier and ClinicalKey logos.

Creating a user profile – it IS worth it!

You will find, on searching through the site that you will be encouraged to register and create a profile. Sometimes websites do this and there aren’t really tangible benefits for users, but in the case of ClinicalKey the profile you create can help you to track your usage and enable you to re-find what you’ve looked at before, this can be helpful if you’ve searched for something on a laptop or desktop and need to refer back quickly via the app on your smart phone later.

By tracking your usage your profile also demonstrates professional development and allows you to access the full text of a lot of the searchable resources. If you have a particular interest in a journal you can subscribe to it and get a notification of new content emailed to your inbox. You can save content to your profile to read later and create presentations, reading lists and collections of information from articles to rights cleared high definition multi-media files to form the basis of a new project or research area.

An intuitive product – designed to get you to the desired results quicker

The design of the site has been carefully thought through using colour coded buttons on the user interface to lessen the cognitive load. These ‘pill’ shaped buttons appear on the search results and will take you easily to specific parts of the search results like diagnosis or summaries.

The filters are easy to use and the results include links to drive you to other relevant information including guidelines, abstracts and drug monographs. The site is optimized for all mobile devices and smartphones. When viewing ClinicalKey from your phone Elsevier recommend you use the mobile app for the best user experience.

Using the toggle to experiment with the user interface you prefer

Of course you may have been using ClinicalKey for a while and you may have been more in favour of the old version of the user interface? That’s OK too – you can easily toggle between the new and classic view by simply performing a search and then using the top left hand toggle to switch from one view to another seamlessly.

Need more information? Bookmark the ClinicalKey FAQs & support page if you need to track down more information about ClinicalKey

Corinne Hogan, Assistant Librarian