Current Awareness in Clinical Toxicology

To ensure that NPIS staff are equipped to answer enquiries on all aspects of human toxicology and that TOXBASE is kept up-to-date, access to current scientific literature is essential. With the assistance of the other NPIS Units, NPIS (Birmingham Unit) produces Current Awareness in Clinical Toxicology each month.

Citations are selected using searches specially developed for the purpose run against PubMed and Embase. In addition, the table of contents of 70 key journals are scanned for suitable papers on publication. Each issue lists some 400 citations, with 15-20 key papers highlighted because of their importance to the clinical management of poisoning. In 2010/11, 6,240 references were added to the NPIS Literature Database, which currently contains 82,000 references. The database is fully searchable using keywords, authors, journals and text words and is available 24/7 to all NPIS staff.