New Updates to the POPLINE Database
POPLINE®, a service of the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project, contains the world’s most comprehensive collection of family planning and related reproductive health and development literature. An international resource, POPLINE helps program managers, policy makers, and service providers gain access to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished documents. To better support our users, especially those in low-resource countries, we have improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the database search system.
Database usage, document requests, and information needs assessments of K4Health audiences guided the following changes:
- Revised Acquisition Guidelines
We reassessed the guidelines used to identify materials for inclusion in POPLINE to ensure that it is more effectively meeting the needs of its primary users. Changes included:
- Shifting topic coverage from global to low-income countries for all topic areas except family planning;
- Revising definitions to further clarify topics and removing out-dated terminology;
- Consolidating and narrowing some broad topics, such as Women in Development, to better reflect current trends in health and development.
POPLINE will continue to expand its collection of literature from and about low-income countries on reproductive health and family planning, HIV/AIDS, and related subjects. See our Acquisition Guidelines for more information.
- Updated User’s Guide to POPLINE Keywords
The ninth edition of the POPLINE thesaurus, User’s Guide to POPLINE Keywords, provides guidance to searchers that allows them to structure both broadly comprehensive and very specific searches of the POPLINE database. It also includes new and revised keywords to reflect changing concepts in population, family planning, and related reproductive health issues. The new Guide includes both an alphabetical and permuted listing along with a supplement describing the changes made in this edition. An interactive web-based version is also available online.
- Changes to database searching and document requests
POPLINE has been collecting information on family planning and reproductive health for almost 40 years and has now grown to almost 400,000 records. Over half the existing database represented documents published before 1990.
To ensure quicker search results we have segmented the POPLINE database into two separate collections:
- POPLINE – The POPLINE collection is comprised of current FP/RH literature. It includes documents published from 1990 to the present, along with some older materials that have been frequently requested by our users. We will continue to provide document delivery, both electronic and hard copy, to individuals and organizations in low-income countries for items cited in the POPLINE database. Please see our Document Delivery Policy for more information.
- POPLINE Archive – The POPLINE Archive provides a way to search the historical collection to include those records added by Columbia University’s Center for Population and Family Health, Princeton’s Population Index, University of North Carolina’s Carolina Population Center and Harvard University’s Annual Review of Population Law. Many of the documents have links to full text on the web; however, document delivery for these documents will no longer be provided.
- JHU CCP Resources on Reproductive Health
In addition to POPLINE Archive, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs also maintains an archive of materials related to reproductive health.
If you have a question about POPLINE, please contact us.
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