For this month’s Specialty Profile, we’ve decided to highlight our newest free feature for Doody’s Core Titles and Doody’s Review Service subscribers called Doody’s Special Topics Lists.

As DCDM readers know well, Doody Enterprises published a COVID-19 Book List in late March. The experience of creating an interdisciplinary book list centered on a single topic or theme experience, along with the widespread positive response we received, helped us to conceive of the idea to publish a quarterly lists of books on timely, critical topics to meet the information needs of health communities across the globe.

On October 1, 2020, we published our inaugural Doody’s Special Topics List focused on Health Equity. Health equity is not a part of the Doody’s taxonomy of health sciences; in other words, we don’t classify books in a health equity category or give it that subject heading. That’s why the list for Health Equity is so special: while some titles will of course focus on health equity specifically, the list is interdisciplinary and broadly conceived, drawing from a wide variety of health specialties and perspectives. It offers something new – and timely – for our readers to consider as they work on developing their collections.

Selected by seasoned librarians with interest and expertise in health equity, the list is comprised of 58 titles from 31 publishers. The costs of the titles range from $0 to $171.00, the average being $54.68. Five of the titles were selected for Doody’s Core Titles 2020, one of which is an Essential Purchase Title. Sixteen of the titles have been reviewed by experts in Doody’s Review Service and only eight of the titles have copyright dates prior to 2015.

If you are a Doody’s Review Service or Doody’s Core Titles subscriber, you can learn more and access the list now by logging in to your account. If not, you may be able to access the list through one of our licensing partners: EBSCO, Rittenhouse, Matthews, and Ovid. If you’re not sure about how you can get access, please contact Customer Service and we’ll gladly assist you. We look forward to publishing our next list, focused on Telehealth, in January 2021.