University of Guelph Library
Dairy Herd Management — Information Resources for Veterinary Practitioners
Books
There are a relatively small number of books that are appropriate for practitioners interested in dairy herd health.
This list is taken from:
Crawley-Low, J. "Veterinary Medicine Books Recommended for Academic Libraries." J Med Libr Assoc. Vol. 92 no. 4 (October 2004).
- Blowey, R. W., and Weaver, A. David. Color Atlas of Diseases and Disorders of Cattle. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Mosby, 2003.
- Howard, Jimmy L., and Smith, Robert, eds. Current Veterinary Therapy(4): Food Animal Practice. 4th ed. Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Company, 1999.
- Radostits, Otto M. Herd Health: Food Animal Production Medicine. 3rd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, c2001.
- Radostits, Otto. M. [and others]. Veterinary Clinical Examination and Diagnosis. London, UK: W. B. Saunders, 2001.
- Radostits, Otto M. [and others], eds. Veterinary Medicine: A Textbook of the Diseases of Cattle, Sheep, Pigs, Goats and Horses. 9th ed. New York, NY: Saunders, c2000.
- Smith, Bradford P., ed. Large Animal Internal Medicine. 3rd ed. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, c2002.
You can check for the availability of these books through sources like:
Out of print titles can sometimes be obtained through Amazon.com or through book dealers such as:
The main publisher in veterinary medicine is Elsevier. This company now encompasses several other well known publishers in the field of health medicine like Saunders, Mosby, Churchill Livingstone, and Butterworth-Heinemann.
Most publishers will sell direct to individuals, and in some cases provide value added on their Web pages by letting you sign up for emailed "alerts" when new books are published.
The Internet
The Internet is a very rich source of information for animal health and practitioners need to be familiar with the types of information found there. Many of your clients will be using the Internet to find information related to their animals' health. The open nature of the Internet means that anyone can "publish" anything, so you should be cautious about information presented there. There are lots of issues to consider when evaluating Web information sources such as:
- who has created the page — are the authors authoritative and credible; are they DVM's, laypeople?
- why has the page been created — is the author trying to sell a service or product?
- when was the Web page created — are you dealing with outdated information?
Remember to think critically about the information you find, and if your are in doubt about its accuracy or validity look for another source to confirm what you have found.
Some Reputable Web Sites
- IVIS
International Veterinary Information Service (IVIS) is a not-for-profit organization established to provide information to veterinarians, veterinary students and animal health professionals worldwide using Internet technology. The IVIS Web site provides free access to original, up-to-date publications organized in electronic books each edited by highly qualified editors, proceedings of veterinary meetings, short courses, continuing education (lecture notes, manuals, autotutorials and interactive Web sites), an international calendar of veterinary events and much more with the help of private and corporate sponsors. - Large Animal Veterinary Rounds
The educational objective of this site and the corresponding published version of Large Animal Veterinary Rounds is to provide interested physicians throughout Canada and around the world with a unique window on some of the most current information and discussion on important scientific and clinical developments in food animal and equine veterinary medicine." - NetVet
A collection of veterinary medicine Web sites maintained by Ken Bochert DVM, the Associate Director of the Division of Comparative Medicine at Washington University. - VetGate
VetGate is a free catalogue of hand-selected and evaluated Internet resources in Animal Health. - VIN - Veterinary Information Network
VIN is a membership based information resource providing access to journal articles, book content, consulting, and document delivery service.
Research Articles
Current or retrospective research articles that will be of interest to you will be contained in journals. Most practitioners have a few professional journals that they receive through memberships or subscribe to personally, e.g., CVJ or JAVMA. In the field of dairy herd health some of the standard journals are:
- Bovine Veterinarian
A supplement to Dairy Herd Management (see below) - Cattle Practice — Journal of the British Cattle Veterinary Association
- Dairy Herd Management
- Journal of Dairy Science
- Veterinary
Clinics of North America — Food Animal Practice
Single topic issues. Available for purchase individually from Elsevier. Some recent issues deal with "Managing the transition cow to optimize health and productivity", "Mastitis", "Bovine theriogenology", and "Emergency medicine and critical care of cattle".
You obviously shouldn't limit yourself to looking in a few journals to find information. Browsing journals hoping to find what you need is very inefficient. Finding research articles is best done by using an index to the journal literature. As a practitioner you'll have access to a few free indexes that are available via the Internet, or you could purchase access to an index on a subscription basis. Having used one of the resources below to find appropriate research articles you'll still have to think about how you will get access to the full article. In some cases AGRICOLA, PubMed, and Google Scholar will provide online access to the full text of free journal content. If you can't access the full text online you might have to consider using one of the document delivery services listed below.
Free Internet-based Journal Databases
- AGRICOLA
One of the major agricultural journal databases available today. Produced by the USDA's National Agricultural Library. - PubMed (NLM)
The premier human health journal database. Doesn't cover the animal health/veterinary medical literature comprehensively. - Google Scholar
Using a search engine like Google to find journal articles can be a big time waster. There's not enough free, full text research/scholarly content available on the Web to meet your needs. Searching Google Scholar can be more rewarding since it focuses on academic literature. You'll often need to have a subscription to access the articles you find.
Remember, there's no such thing as "one stop shopping" when you're looking for journal articles. Because of the restricted content of the free Internet-based journal indexes you should consult as many sources as you can.
Fee-based Journal Databases
Available to individuals on an annual subscription basis.
- CAB Direct
The absolute best source for research articles dealing with animal health and veterinary medicine. - Animal Health and Production Compendium
A global compilation of animal health and production knowledge for practical decision-making. Focusing on all aspects of animal health and production including diseases, nutrition, husbandry and breeding. - Animal Science Database
The content of Animal Science Database is a subset of CAB Abstracts. It provides quite a lot of value-added content such as: commissioned (peer-reviewed) reviews on critical topics, useful research updates and spotlights on key issues, international news, updated daily, a calendar of forthcoming conferences and meetings, links to important internet resources, and discounted book titles available from CABI Publishing.
Document Delivery Services
The following three companies provide fee-based document delivery services. If you find articles through the resources listed above and need to obtain copies these companies can provide them. The cost per article varies depending on the article requested.
Database Searching
If you would prefer to have someone else search for research articles, there are companies like the one listed below which will carry out custom research for you.