During the 20+ years Doody Enterprises has been working with health sciences publishers to review their books and disseminate information about their publishing programs, we have seen a lot of upheaval. Elsevier is a prominent example. Once we received books from individual publishers such as Hanley & Belfus, Churchill Livingstone, Mosby-Year Book, and W.B. Saunders; now we get them from Elsevier, which, through a variety of acquisitions, has subsumed these imprints. Over the past year, we’ve received 214 titles from Elsevier and reviewed 79 of them, with 52 still out for review. Those books represent 62 clinical medicine, allied health, basic science, and nursing specialties. Not surprisingly, the books have fared very well in the review process, with the vast majority garnering 3 to 5 Doody Stars, with more than half scoring either 4 or 5 stars.

Elsevier figures prominently in Doody’s Core Titles 2013, with 538 of the 2,188 titles on the list from Elsevier or one of its imprints. Of course, these are not just titles from the last year – copyright dates range from 1997 through 2014. In addition, 150 Elsevier books were deemed Essential Purchase titles by the librarians who worked on DCT. Searches of Elsevier titles on the DRS and DCT platforms reveal that eVersions of Elsevier’s titles are found on Elsevier’s proprietary platforms, ScienceDirect and ClinicalKey, as well as on other aggregators’ platforms, including EBL, R2, eBooks@EBSCOhost, ebrary, and as apps on the Unbound Medicine platform.