Why don all electronic journals look alike?
Ejournals are produced by different publishers just as print journals are. These publishers can either be professional societies or commercial publishers. Ejournals can also be provided collectively by a commercial aggregator company such as Ovid who negotiates with individual publishers to provide multiple titles. Each provider of an ejournal creates the method by which you interact with them (or interface) and determines the format of the actual text. The current standard text formats include ASCII (plain text without graphics), HTML (looks different than the print, prints more pages than the print equivalent) or PDF (looks just like a snapshot of the print, requires a special free viewer available on the Internet). In addition to the interface and text format, the number of years covered by an ejournal varies as well as the currency of the information provided. Ovid often is several weeks to a month behind since they acquire the data from the publishers and reformat it into HTML. Co
