EBSCO offers numerous Subject Sets in health sciences including Sports Medicine & Physical Therapy, Public Health & Epidemiology and Nursing to name a few. Topics are chosen specifically to meet the needs of both academic institutions as well as medical libraries serving practicing health care professionals. We consider customer title requests, industry trends and internal sales and usage metrics to determine subject set topics. This year we are adding Critical Care Medicine and Primary Care Medicine to our rotation of medical subject sets.
Subject sets are among my favorite types of eBook collections to work on. We really take pride in the quality of these collections. Each title that is considered for inclusion in the subject set is thoroughly reviewed. I enjoy examining the content, reading industry reviews of the title in question and in some cases even researching the author.
We are fortunate to have other tools for title selection such as Doody’s Review Services. Doody's is an authoritative book review service covering titles in the health sciences. Doody’s reviewers are experts in the field of the content that they are evaluating so I can trust these reviews to be thorough and reliable. Other resources include “best of” lists, for example the American Journal of Nursing Books of the Year list.
To me the subject set is more than just a selection list. There is a bit of an art to curating these collections. I like to think of the subject set as a whole unit and not just a grouping of e-books in a chosen topic. Once I’ve gathered a group of titles that meet our quality standards, I select a handful of must have titles to create a base for the subject set. The collection then starts to take on a distinct character. We want to have a collection of titles that are complementary to each other and not just a set of high-quality titles that are within the scope of the topic at hand.
As budgets are cut and librarians have less time and resources for collection development, our goal is to offer subject sets to help streamline the process of eBook acquisitions. The EBSCO eBook Collection Development team keeps this mission in mind as we work to create useful, timely and quality subject sets for our customers.
Here's a list of the newly updated and newly created Subject Sets for 2024:
- Accounting & Finance
- American Contemporary Issues
- Anthropology & Archaeology
- Biology & Life Sciences
- Biomedical Engineering
- Career/Vocational
- Computer Science
- New! Critical Care Medicine
- Economics
- Education
- Energy & Green Technologies
- Engineering
- English for Speakers of Other Languages
- Fine Arts & Music
- New! Food Science
- International Relations
- Leadership & Management
- Library & Archival Science
- Literary Criticism & Writing
- Natural & Alternative Medicine
- Networking & Security
- New! Pediatrics
- Pharmaceutical Science
- New! Primary Care Medicine
- Psychology
- Public Health & Epidemiology
- New! Reference
- Social Work
- Urban Studies
- World History
The easiest and most accurate way to view Subject Sets is through EBSCOhost Collection Manager (ECM). Need an ECM account? Subject Sets are also available as Spotlight Lists in GOBI. To request a title list or pricing, click here to have an EBSCO representative contact you.
