Collaborating with Veterinary Pharmacists to Improve Access to the Literature of Veterinary Pharmacology and Pharmacy Practice

Objective: To partner with veterinary pharmacists to improve knowledge of and access to drug literature relevant to veterinary pharmacy through collaborative resource management, teaching, and research. Methods: Veterinary Pharmacy residents rotate through the library for a research and drug information two-week block involving resource management, teaching, and research. The residents discussed possible projects with the library director and chose to collaborate with library staff to study the literature of veterinary pharmacology and pharmacy practice through mapping publications cited by authors of veterinary drug monographs hosted by the American Academy of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the 2016 issues of Journal of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics (JVPT), and the 2015 print version of Plumb’s Veterinary Drug Handbook. Results: Resident-led resource management activities in 2016-2017 included recommending resources from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy’s Basic Resources for Pharmacy Education list for purchase and suggesting revisions to PharmLibWiki-Veterinary Pharmacy. Teaching comprised a collaborative, interprofessional session for third-year veterinary students on drug information and prescription writing in the Success in the Clinics course. The research project used the methodology from the mapping the literature studies published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association of characterizing citations and dividing them into three zones based on Bradford’s Law of Scattering. JVPT relied on journal articles (92%) much more than the monographs (65%) or Plumb’s (55%), and Plumb’s cited the most conference proceedings (27%). Literature older than five years is still cited; the rates of citation within five years of publication are higher for Plumb’s (40%) than for JVPT (25%) or the monographs (17%). Indexing coverage for the Zone 1 and 2 journals comprising 2/3rds of the citations was above 90% in Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed with unique veterinary content indexed by CAB Abstracts (88%). Health sciences libraries serving pharmacy and veterinary medicine education subscribe to 94% of the 33 journals from Zone 1 of JVPT and Zones 1 and 2 of the AAVPT monographs and Plumb’s, while libraries serving pharmacy without veterinary medicine average 48%